Grant: Engage Grants Program

For the monitoring of fish and wildlife, innovative sensing technologies are required. The commonly used sensors are tags, which are sensors attached to or embedded inside living species to monitor the movement of the species or environmental parameters such as temperature, pressure, and light scattering. Fibre-optic sensors, which use light propagation inside an insulating fibre core to monitor changes in the environment, possess significant advantages of higher electrostatic discharge (ESD) tolerance and possible multiparameter measurement. However, there are several challenges which require further study before any fibre-optic sensor can be adopted in the tags. By establishing collaboration between the photonics group at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Lotek Wireless Inc., a world leader in the design and manufacture of fish and wildlife monitoring systems, this NSERC Engage Grant project investigates the feasibility of operating fibre-optic sensors in wide wavelength ranges. The optical fibre sensor community has been predominantly adopting optical telecommunication fibres as the carrier for optical sensing with the near infrared telecommunication lights for monitoring. The sensing performance of the fibre-optic sensors in shorter wavelengths, such as visible lights, has been seldom addressed. This project will help Lotek Wireless Inc. address the problem of determining whether fibre-optic sensors can be operated in wide wavelength ranges for possible tag application. In addition to optical sensing for fish and wildlife monitoring, the knowledge acquired from this research will have potential applications in other areas, such as environmental monitoring, biomedical engineering, structural health monitoring, oil and gas industry, which will benefit Canadian industries in these fields.