The use of ultra wide-band ultrasonic fiber optic sensors in biomedical ultrasonic and optoacoustic applications is an open alternative to conventional piezoelectric transducers. As they are non-metallic and non-electric sensors, they can be combined with MRI in a multimodal imaging technique and can be made from biocompatible materials opening the possibility for the fabrication of an optoacoustic endoscope. The acoustic sensitivity of the intrinsic fiber optic interferometric sensors depends strongly of the material which is composed of. In this work we characterize and compare experimentally the intrinsic ultrasonic sensitivities of three optical fibers: a single-mode silica optical fiber, a singlemode polymer optical fiber and a multimode graded-index perfluorinated polymer optical fiber. All these optical fibers can be used to construct an intrinsic interferometric optical fiber sensor for ultrasonic and optoacoustic applications with frequencies in the range from 100kHz to 10MHz.

Date Published: 17 May 2011
PDF: 4 pages
Proc. SPIE 7753, 21st International Conference on Optical Fiber Sensors, 775370 (17 May 2011); doi: 10.1117/12.886100

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