Small-diameter optical fiber with a 40-μm cladding diameter is suitable for an embedded sensor in a composite material, because it has high sensitivity and does not induce mechanical deterioration inside the structure. The bare small-diameter fiber outside the structure, however, is too fragile and hard to handle. In practical use, the small-diameter fiber needs to be joined to a normal optical fiber with a 125-μm cladding diameter. This paper presents estimation results of the joint loss between the small-diameter optical fiber and the normal optical fiber and two practical joining techniques, a detachable connector method and a permanent fused splice method. The joint losses were less than 1 dB for the both joining methods. These joining techniques promote the usage of the small-diameter optical fiber for practical heath monitoring systems.

Date Published: 23 May 2005
PDF: 4 pages
Proc. SPIE 5855, 17th International Conference on Optical Fibre Sensors, (23 May 2005);

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 5855:
17th International Conference on Optical Fibre Sensors
Marc Voet; Reinhardt Willsch; Wolfgang Ecke; Julian Jones; Brian Culshaw, Editor(s)