Distributed polymer optical fiber sensors: a review and outlook

Abstract

Aging degradation and seismic damage of civil infrastructures have become a serious issue for society, and one promising technology for monitoring their conditions is optical fiber sensing. Glass optical fibers have been predominantly used for the past several decades to develop fiber sensors, but currently polymer or plastic optical fibers (POFs) have also been used extensively to develop advanced fiber sensors because of their unique features, such as high flexibility, large breakage strain, and impact resistance. This review focuses on recently developed distributed and quasi-distributed POF-based sensing techniques based on Rayleigh scattering, Brillouin scattering, and fiber Bragg gratings.

Properties of Fiber Bragg Grating in CYTOP Fiber Response to Temperature, Humidity, and Strain Using Factorial Design

“…Applying relation (9) to our fibers gives 1.24 nm for grating #1 and 1.57 nm for grating #2, and the corresponding experimental values of 1.23 nm and 1.54 nm for gratings #1 and #2, respectively. Figure 2 clearly shows the multi-peak like FBG spectra, typical of grating in multimode fibers, and the main question is "which mode group should be followed to get the measurement?".…”

“…Due to significant properties such as low Young's modulus, biocompatibility, low weight, and high flexibility, polymer optical fibers (POFs) received more and more attention in the fields of sensing applications [8][9][10]. Among the POFs, CYTOP fiber is a good candidate due to its significantly low attenuation in telecom transparency windows and specific material characteristics [11][12][13][14][15].…”

Smartphone-Based High-Throughput Fiber-Integrated Immunosensing System for Point-of-Care Testing of the SARS-CoV-2 Nucleocapsid Protein

“…In order to solve the problem of a long imaging distance and edge distortion of the image, we tried to concentrate the transmitted light from each well to a dense area through individual optical fibers. At present, the widely used optical fibers are common glass fibers and polymeric optical fibers (POFs). , It is difficult to customize glass fibers due to its easy to break property and lack of light transmittance, while the PMMA fiber, a main type of POF, utilized in this study has easily customized diameters, better flexibility, and stronger light transmittance (Figure S2). A square area (82 mm * 82 mm) of 100 microwells within the plate was used for imaging, and the light signals were gathered in the 14 mm * 14 mm area through optical fiber transmission (Figure S3), which greatly reduced the focal length of shooting and effectively improved the shooting quality.…”

Temperature Sensors based on Polymer Fiber Optic Interferometer

“…The main parameters of commercially available POF are large core diameter (from 500 to 1000 µm), the high value of numerical aperture (from 0.19 to 0.5), and high attenuation (from 0.19 to 0.25 dB/m for the wavelength of 650 nm) [66] comparing to 8.2 µm, 0.14 and 0.02 dB/km for 1525-1575 nm [67] for conventional silica glass optical fiber. It must be noted that even though the POF have acceptable attenuation in the visible range it is impossible to use them as a transmission medium in the telecommunication wavelength because of the very high attenuation of light [68] reaching 1000 dB/km for 1000 nm in case of PMMA POF (Figure 3). however, the new materials allow for the production of POF with loss as low as 0.11 dB/cm at 840 nm [36].…”