Novel 3D-printed biaxial tilt sensor based on fiber Bragg grating sensing approach

[Display omitted] •3D-printed tilt sensors are easy to manufacture, light, compact and cost effective.•Biaxial measurements provide larger operating range of the tilt sensor.•Fiber Bragg gratings approach were used due to its immunity against electromagnetic interference and short circuits.•A fiber Bragg grating is added as a temperature sensor to compensate the shift due to the change in temperature. In this work, a novel 3D-printed biaxial sensor system for tilt measurement, based primarily on the use of four Fiber Bragg Grating (FBG) devices, has been developed and its performance characterized. The tilt sensor system created is of a compact design and relatively small dimensions, making it ideally suited to a variety of industrial applications. In the system developed, the four FBGs used were spliced in a serial formation and attached to four different sides of the sensor structure designed, to allow biaxial measurements to be made. The wavelengths' shift of the FBGs used were monitored as a function of the tilt of the device, using an Optical Spectrum Analyzer (OSA) for this development work. In the sensor, an average FBG-based responsivity of 0.01 nm/° of tilt was measured for each of the different FBGs used. To provide compensation for temperature changes in the system itself, a further FBG-based approach was used (in which they were configured to be insensitive to the effect of the tilt). They were thus calibrated by being exposed to a range of operational temperatures for the system, showing, as a result, a calibration of 0.011 nm/°C. Prior work on the sensor system had proved it to be highly linear in response, over the tilt range of 0° ± 90°. The experimental results obtained from the performance characterization indicate that the small, compact design of this type yields excellent responsivity, compared to other larger and more complex designs discussed in the literature. The sensor system was also relatively easy to fabricate using the 3D-printing method, creating in that way an inexpensive, temperature-compensated tilt monitoring device that had a wide variety of potential industrial applications.