A IR-Femtosecond Laser Hybrid Sensor to Measure the Thermal Expansion and Thermo-Optical Coefficient of Silica-Based FBG at High Temperatures

Sensors (Basel). 2018 Jan 26;18(2):359. doi: 10.3390/s18020359.

Abstract

In this paper, a hybrid sensor was fabricated using a IR-femtosecond laser to measure the thermal expansion and thermo-optical coefficient of silica-based fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs). The hybrid sensor was composed of an inline fiber Fabry-Perot interferometer (FFPI) cavity and a type-II FBG. Experiment results showed that the type-II FBG had three high reflectivity resonances in the wavelength ranging from 1100 to 1600 nm, showing the peaks in 1.1, 1.3 and 1.5 μm, respectively. The thermal expansion and thermo-optical coefficient (1.3 μm, 1.5 μm) of silica-based FBG, under temperatures ranging from 30 to 1100 °C, had been simultaneously calculated by measuring the wavelength of the type-II FBG and FFPI cavity length.

Keywords: IR-femtosecond laser; fiber optics sensor; high temperatures; thermal expansion coefficient; thermo-optical coefficient.