Prediction of light-transmission losses in plastic optical fibers

Abstract

A theoretical expression is derived, based on a geometrical optics approach, with which to predict light-transmission losses in multimode plastic optical fibers for office or home lighting. Two types of optical ray arrangement, meridional ray and skew ray, are evaluated, and five loss mechanisms are identified and considered. The meridional arrangement results in a lower overall loss of light than the skew ray arrangement. The theoretical results were compared with experimental measurements taken for a 0.5-cm-diameter polymer optical fiber. For optical rays entering the fiber at incident angles of less than 20 degrees, the theoretical results are in good agreement with the empirical results.

Transmission performance of fibre-optic bundle for solar lighting

“…The radiant flux was estimated to be 26 W at the end of a 10 m long fibre with 88% transmission efficiency [16]. Tekelioglu and Wood [17] put forward that plastic optical fibres (POF) could be damaged thermally under IR radiation. They proposed five different solutions for this problem.…”

“…These are using a cooling fan, an optical filter or a thin quartz rod, operating the system under low external temperature (between 0 and À51C) or using a selective coating in front of the FOB. They indicated that using a 15 mm thick quartz rod can keep the temperature under 601C at the entrance of the FOB [17]. Rather than presenting a thorough study on the effects of these solutions on the transmission performance of FOB and the spectral quality of light, they utilized a monochromatic radiation at 650 nm in their experiments to present bending effects for a unique optical fibre while the solar spectrum presents a wide band character.…”

Effects of End-Face Tilt Angle on Numerical Aperture for Straight and Bent Plastic Optical Fibers

“…The main types of POFs, their manufacture, and possible present and expected future applications have been reported [1,2]. Many research efforts are related to the computational simulation of their performance under different configurations in order to exploit their remarkable characteristics [3][4][5][6]. Because of the importance of mode coupling for the design and operation of optical fibers, a number of different methods of evaluating the coupling effects have been reported [7][8][9][10][11][12].…”

Contributions to characterization, modeling and design of concentrator photovoltaic systems

“…Actually, the use of optical guides for sunlighting of buildings is already a commercial technology (Himawari 2009;Parans 2011), and different prototypes based on this technology have been proposed (Feuermann, Gordon, and Huleihil 2002b;Sansoni et al 2008;Tekelioglu and Wood 2009;Liang et al 1998;Wong and Yang 2012;Ullah and Shin 2014;Sapia 2013;Fraas, Pyle, and Ryason 1983). This involves coupling concentrated sunlight into fibers or other guides made of plastic or glass.…”

“…(6.10). (6.10) ηTIR is defined as the effective reflectivity of the total internal reflection (TIR) at the corecladding interface (Tekelioglu and Wood 2005) for each ray angle inside the fiber. For n and k, we are assuming a constant value in the visible range, which is realistic for this approach.…”