This paper demonstrates a highly effective method for fibre Bragg grating (FBG) inscription into a seven core fibre (7CF) and its application as an effective vector bending sensor. The development of multicore fibres (MCFs) and enabling the fabrication of FBGs into them result in a solution for multi-parameter measurements such as temperature/strain/bending/twist. The FBG in the central core of 7CF is on the neutral axis and therefore it is sensitive only to thermal and insensitive to deformational change, whereas the FBGs in the none-central cores that are evenly distributed over the 7CF cross-section can facilitate the measurement of structure deformation, such as bending, loading and twist. Furthermore, the FBGs in different cores respond to the physical perturbations differently in various orientations, offering vector sensing to measure both amplitude and direction of the structure change. The 7CF-FBG sensors are highly applicable for mechanical structures and flexible medical instruments.
In this paper, an egg-shaped microbubble is proposed and analyzed firstly, which is fabricated by the pressure-assisted arc discharge technique. By tailoring the arc parameters and the position of glass tube during the fabrication process, the thinnest wall of the fabricated microbubble could reach to the level of 873nm. Then, the fiber Fabry–Perot interference technique is used to analyze the deformation of microbubble that under different filling pressures. It is found that the endface of micro-bubble occurs compression when the inner pressure increasing from 4Kpa to 1400KPa. And the pressure sensitivity of such egg-shaped microbubble sample is14.3pm/Kpa. Results of this study could be good reference for developing new pressure sensors, etc.
We proposed and experimentally demonstrated four kinds of high-sensitivity gas pressure sensors based on in-fiber devices, including a sub-micron silica diaphragm-based fiber-tip, a polymer-capped Fabry-Perot interferometer, an inflated long period fiber grating and a twin core fiber-based Mach-Zehnder interferometer, which have sensitivities of 1036, 1130, 1680, 9600 pm/MPa, respectively.
We investigated experimentally liquid crystal (LC) filled photonic crystal fiber’s temperature responses at different temperature ranging from 30 to 80°C. Experimental evidences presented that the LC’s clearing point temperature was 58°C, which is consistent with the theoretical given value. The bandgap transmission was found to have opposite temperature responses lower and higher than the LC’s clearing point temperature owing to its phase transition property. A high bandgap tuning sensitivity of 105 nm/°C was achieved around LC’s clearing point temperature.
We demonstrated an ultrasensitive temperature sensor based on a unique fiber Fabry-Perot interferometer (FPI). The FPI was created by means of splicing a mercury-filled silica tube with a single-mode fiber (SMF). The FPI had an air cavity, which was formed by the end face of the SMF and that of the mercury column. Experimental results showed that the FPI had an ultrahigh temperature-sensitivity of up to -41 nm/°C, which was about one order of magnitude higher than those of the reported FPI-based fiber tip sensors. Such a FPI temperature sensor is expected to have potential applications for highly-sensitive ambient temperature sensing.
This paper reports a new silica fiber-tip Fabry-Perot interferometer with thin film and large surface area characteristic for high pressure and vacuum degree detection simultaneously, which is fabricated by etching a flat fiber tip into concave surface firstly, with subsequent arc jointing the concave fiber into a inline Fabry-Perot cavity, then drawing one surface of the F-P cavity into several micrometers scale by arc discharge and finally etching the surface into sub-micrometer scale integrally. As the silica fiber-tip Fabry-Perot interferometer film thickness could be tailored very thinly by HF acid solution, plus the surface area of thin film could be expanded during the chemical etching process, the variation of the bubble cavity length is very sensitive to the inner/outer pressure difference of the fiber-tip Fabry-Perot interferometer. Experimental result shows an high sensitivity of 780nm/MPa is feasible. Such configuration has the advantages of lowcost, ease of fabrication and compact size, which make it a promising candidate for pressure and vacuum measurement.
We reported a few high-sensitivity optical strain sensors based on different types of in-fiber FPIs with air bubble cavities those were fabricated by use of a commercial fusion splicer. The cavity length and the shape of air bubbles were investigated to enhance its tensile strain sensitivity. A FPI based on a spherical air bubble was demonstrated by splicing together two sections of standard single-mode fibers, and the spherical air bubble was reshaped into an elliptical air bubble by mean of repeating arc discharge, so the strain sensitivity of the FPI based on an elliptical air bubble was enhanced to 6.0 pm⁄με owe to the decrease of the air cavity length. Moreover, a unique FPI based on a rectangular air bubble was demonstrated by use of an improved technique for splicing two sections of standard single mode fibers together and tapering the splicing joint. The sensitivity of the rectangular-bubble-based strain sensor was enhanced to be up to 43.0 pm/με and is the highest strain sensitivity among the in-fiber FPI-based strain sensors with air bubble cavities reported so far. The reason for this is that the rectangular air bubble has a sharply taper and a thin wall with a thickness of about 1 μm. Moreover, those strain sensors above have a very low temperature sensitivity of about 2.0 pm/oC. Thus, the temperature-induced strain measurement error is less than 0.046 με/oC.
We demonstrated a high-sensitivity strain sensor based on an in-line Fabry-Perot interferometer with an air cavity whose was created by splicing together two sections of standard single mode fibers. The sensitivity of this strain sensor was enhanced to 6.02 pm/με by improving the cavity length of the Fabry-Perot interferometer by means of repeating arc discharges for reshaping the air cavity. Moreover, such a strain sensor has a very low temperature sensitivity of 1.06 pm/°C, which reduces the cross-sensitivity problem between tensile strain and temperature.
An improved arc discharge technique was demonstrated to inscribe high-quality LPFGs with a resonant attenuation of - 28 dB and an insertion loss of 0.2 dB by use of a commercial fusion splicer. Such a technique avoids the influence of the mass which is prerequisite for traditional technique. Moreover, no physical deformation was observed on the LPFG surface. Compared with more than 86 grating periods required by traditional arc discharge technique, only 27 grating periods were required to inscribe a compact LPFG by our improved arc discharge technique.
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