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A new miniaturized fiber-optic laser Doppler velocimetry (LDV) sensor has been developed, which is capable of measuring the local velocity in various semi-opaque and opaque fluid flows, particularly whole blood velocity in vessels. The sensor has a convex lens-like fiber tip as a pickup and an improved optical transmission system with markedly decreased stray light. This paper describes methods for fabricating fiber tips like concave and convex lens and the characteristics of the optical sensor system equipped with the fabricated fiber tip. Conventional fiber-optic LDV sensors developed up to now have not been capable of measuring such opaque fluids because scattered light from scattering particles as erythrocytes has very low intensity, which makes signal-to-noise ratio of Doppler signal received by a sensor pickup significantly decreased. To overcome these problems, convex lens-like fiber tips have been fabricated by chemical etching, in which quartz fibers of multimode graded refractive index have been etched in aqueous solutions of hydrogen fluoride and ammonium fluoride under the appropriately controlled condition of the concentration of the solution, the etching duration time and the etchant temperature to obtain the desired curvature radius of the lens-like surface of the fiber tip. In this fiber-optic sensor, a laser beam emitted from the fiber tip can be focused at any position from about 0.1 to 0.5 mm distant from the fiber tip according to its curvature radius. The convex lens-like etched tip totally reduced the intensity of undesired reflecting light at the fiber end by 1/2 to 1/6 compared with normal cut fiber tip. Consequently, this fiber-optic LDV sensor system is capable of measuring the local flow velocity in semi-opaque and opaque fluids, whose turbidity was about five times higher than by any kinds of previous sensors. |
