Confocal flowmeter based on self-mixing interferometry for real-time velocity profiling of turbid liquids flowing in microcapillaries.

We propose a new confocal device for flow profiling in microcapillaries. A viewfinder system is developed using a visible light microscope, allowing focusing with high precision an 830 nm Fabry-Perot laser diode on a microchannel. By means of a novel confocal approach, the Doppler shift produced by the particles of a turbid liquid moving in the focal plane can be measured in real time using the well-known self-mixing effect. The resolution of this device is characterized in function of the full width at half maximum of the Gaussian frequency peak related to the self-mixing signal in the frequency domain. Velocity measurements for flow rates from 0.2 to 1.6 mL/min are presented, and the results demonstrate that the method reduces the phase noise and the effects of the out-of-focus particles, allowing straightforward flow profiling in microchannel structures.

Microcantilever Displacement Measurement Using a Mechanically Modulated Optical Feedback Interferometer.

Microcantilever motion detection is a useful tool for the characterization of the physical, chemical and biological properties of materials. In the past, different approaches have been proposed and tested to enhance the behavior, size and simplicity of microcantilever motion detectors. In this paper, a new approach to measure microcantilever motion with nanometric resolution is presented. The proposed approach is based on the concept of mechanically-modulated optical feedback interferometry, a technique that has shown displacement measurement capabilities well within the nanometric scale and that, due to its size, compactness and low cost, may be a suitable choice for measuring nanometric motions in cantilever-like sensors. It will be shown that the sensor, in its current state of development, is capable of following a cantilever sinusoidal trajectory at different sets of frequencies ranging up to 200 Hz and peak to peak amplitudes up to λ / 2 with experimental resolutions in the λ / 100 range.

Current Developments on Optical Feedback Interferometry as an All-Optical Sensor for Biomedical Applications.

Optical feedback interferometry (OFI) sensors are experiencing a consistent increase in their applications to biosensing due to their contactless nature, low cost and compactness, features that fit very well with current biophotonics research and market trends. The present paper is a review of the work in progress at UPC-CD6 and LAAS-CNRS related to the application of OFI to different aspects of biosensing, both in vivo and ex vivo. This work is intended to present the variety of opportunities and potential applications related to OFI that are available in the field. The activities presented are divided into two main sensing strategies: The measurement of optical path changes and the monitoring of flows, which correspond to sensing strategies linked to the reconstruction of changes of amplitude from the interferometric signal, and to classical Doppler frequency measurements, respectively. For optical path change measurements, measurements of transient pulses, usual in biosensing, together with the measurement of large displacements applied to designing palliative care instrumentation for Parkinson disease are discussed. Regarding the Doppler-based approach, progress in flow-related signal processing and applications in real-time monitoring of non-steady flows, human blood flow monitoring and OFI pressure myograph sensing will be presented. In all cases, experimental setups are discussed and results presented, showing the versatility of the technique. The described applications show the wide capabilities in biosensing of the OFI sensor, showing it as an enabler of low-cost, all-optical, high accuracy biomedical applications.

Extraction of vibration parameters from optical feedback interferometry signals using wavelets.

This paper proposes the use of the wavelet transform as a technique that is suited for fringe detection and analysis of optical feedback interferometry (OFI) signals, thus allowing the retrieval of extremely small physical motion phenomena. A novel algorithm based on wavelet transform is used to process the OFI signal simultaneously in the time and frequency domains, enabling precise detection of signal fringes and, thus, the extraction of amplitude features of the vibrating target with error in the order of 0.1λ. Furthermore, using a complex Morlet wavelet as an analyzing wavelet enables us to extract important information from the time envelope of the OFI signal. Such an envelope can be useful in detecting fringes even in the presence of speckle reducing the error in a displacement reconstruction. Examples of OFI applications, including nanometric displacement sensing without direction ambiguity as well as the measurement of the frequency and velocity of vibrating targets and the detection in time of no periodic events, are also presented using this wavelet approach.