Design, development and experimental study of novel configuration of retro reflective fiber optic sensor for measuring of surface roughness

This paper reports a novel retro reflective fiber optic surface roughness sensor. The sensor probe consists of three parallel fibers and one inclined at an angle of 5⁰. The reflector is placed at optimized distance in order to get maximum sensitivity for surface roughness measurement. Mathematical modeling of this fiber optic displacement sensor is reported based on ray tracing method. MS surfaces are sprayed with aluminum to get different surface roughness values which are measured on the standard instrument. Experiments are performed for measuring surface roughness values for these surfaces. Experimental results show good agreement with simulation results. These results are also compared and validated with standard instrument used to measure the surface roughness.