Development of a polymer based fiberoptic magnetostrictive metal detector system

This paper presents a new metal detector using a fiberoptic magnetostriction sensor. The metal sensor uses a fiber-optic Mach-Zehnder interferometer with a newly developed ferromagnetic polymer as the magnetostrictive sensing material. This polymeric magnetostrictive fiberoptic metal sensor is simple to fabricate and small in size. In contrast to electromagnetic type metal detectors, this fiber optic metal sensor is resistant to RF interference . Metal detection is based on disruption of the magnetic flux density across the magnetostriction sensor. In this paper, characteristics of the material being sensed and magnetic properties of the ferromagnetic polymers will be discussed.