Fibre Bragg gratings have been UV inscribed in multimode microstructured polymer optical fibre in both the 1550nm and 800nm spectral regions. Thermally annealing the fibre at 80°C has been shown to shrink the fibre length and as a result a permanent negative Bragg wavelength shift is observed. The blue shift can be tuned between 0-16nm in the 1550nm spectral region and 0-6nm in the 800nm spectral region, depending on the duration the heat is applied before a saturation level is reached and the fibre stops shrinking in the region of 2 hours. Exploiting this, wavelength division multiplexed sensors have been UV inscribed in both the 1550nm and 800nm regions using a single phase mask for each wavelength region. The 800nm sensor takes advantage of the lower attenuation of poly (methyl methacrylate) of 2dB/m compared to 100dB/m at 1550nm.

Date Published: 17 May 2011
PDF: 4 pages
Proc. SPIE 7753, 21st International Conference on Optical Fiber Sensors, 77536T (17 May 2011); doi: 10.1117/12.885926

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 7753:
21st International Conference on Optical Fiber Sensors
Jacques Albert; Wojtek J. Bock, Editor(s)