Design, fabrication, and testing of fiber Bragg grating sensors for cryogenic long-range displacement measurement

•Design and fabrication of FBG based long range displacement sensor suitable for cryogenic temperatures.•The design of the spring suitable to cover the long range displacement at cryogenic temperature.•Investigation of various glues and its strain transfer coefficient at low temperature.•The design of the telescope tube to reduce the sensor dimension.•Testing the sensor characteristics at low temperature.

It is essential to measure the shrinkage/expansion and positioning/aligning of magnets and to control valve displacement which plays a vital role in experiments like the Karlsruhe tritium neutrino experiment beam tube and Cryo pumps. Hence, a displacement sensor which, over a long working range, can be operated under extreme environmental conditions needs to be developed. Fiber Bragg gratings (FBG) have been considered to be excellent sensor elements useful for a variety of applications. This paper will discuss a long range displacement sensors based on fiber Bragg gratings for cryogenic temperature applications. The cryo pump inlet valve control requirements have been taken as example specifications for sensor design. To achieve the development goal, a proper signal transducer and sensor package were designed. A study of the strain transmission of surface-bonded FBG was conducted. The influence of bonding thickness and bonding length was reported. The design, fabrication, and performance were tested at low temperature of around 77 K. The sensor performance was found to be satisfactory at both room temperature and 77 K and linearly for long-range displacement of 550 mm with 14 pm/mm sensitivity and 0.142 mm accuracy.