Gotzon Aldabaldetreku

Dependence of bending losses on cladding thickness in plastic optical fibers.

Our main goal is to provide a comprehensive explanation of the existing differences in bending losses arising from having step-index multimode plastic optical fibers with different cladding thickness and under different types of conditions, namely, the variable bend radius R, the number of fiber turns, or the fiber diameter. For this purpose, both experimental and numerical result of bending losses are presented for different cladding thicknesses and conditions. For the measurements, two cladding thicknesses have been considered: one finite and another infinite. A fiber in air has a finite cladding thickness, and rays are reflected at the cladding-air interface, whereas a fiber covered by oil is equivalent to having an infinite cladding, since the very similar refractive index of oil prevents reflections from occurring at the cladding-oil interface. For the sake of comparison, numerical simulations based on ray tracing have been performed for finite-cladding step-index multimode waveguides. The numerical results reinforce the experimental data, and both the experimental measurements and the computational simulations turn out to be very useful to explain the behavior of refracting and tunneling rays along bent multimode waveguides and along finite-cladding fibers.

An Optical Fiber Bundle Sensor for Tip Clearance and Tip Timing Measurements in a Turbine Rig

When it comes to measuring blade-tip clearance or blade-tip timing in turbines, reflective intensity-modulated optical fiber sensors overcome several traditional limitations of capacitive, inductive or discharging probe sensors. This paper presents the signals and results corresponding to the third stage of a multistage turbine rig, obtained from a transonic wind-tunnel test. The probe is based on a trifurcated bundle of optical fibers that is mounted on the turbine casing. To eliminate the influence of light source intensity variations and blade surface reflectivity, the sensing principle is based on the quotient of the voltages obtained from the two receiving bundle legs. A discrepancy lower than 3% with respect to a commercial sensor was observed in tip clearance measurements. Regarding tip timing measurements, the travel wave spectrum was obtained, which provides the average vibration amplitude for all blades at a particular nodal diameter. With this approach, both blade-tip timing and tip clearance measurements can be carried out simultaneously. The results obtained on the test turbine rig demonstrate the suitability and reliability of the type of sensor used, and suggest the possibility of performing these measurements in real turbines under real working conditions.

Design and Development of a Low-Cost Optical Current Sensor

In this paper we demonstrate the design of a low-cost optical current sensor. The sensor principle is the Faraday rotation of a light beam through a magneto-optical material, SF2, when a magnetic field is present. The prototype has a high sensitivity and a high linearity for currents ranging from 0 up to 800 A. The error of the optical fibre sensor is smaller than 1% for electric currents over 175 A.

Analysis of the use of tapered graded-index polymer optical fibers for refractive-index Sensors.

The behavior of tapered graded-index polymer optical fibers is analyzed computationally for different refractive indices of the surrounding medium. This serves to clarify the main parameters affecting their possible performance as refractive-index sensors and extends an existing study of similar structures in glass fibers. The ray-tracing method is employed, its specific implementation is explained, and its results are compared with experimental ones, both from our laboratory and from the literature. The results show that the current commercial graded-index polymer optical fibers can be used to measure a large range of refractive indices with several advantages over glass fibers.

New method to calculate mode conversion coefficients in SI multimode optical fibers

A simple method is proposed for the experimental calculation of the mode conversion coefficients in multimode optical fibers. It only requires observing the far-field output pattern from a fixed length of fiber as the launching angle changes, as well as the intersection point between two far-field output patterns corresponding to two different input angles. The results obtained with this method are quite insensitive to small variations of the experimental parameters. A good agreement between theoretical and experimental results is also found.

Optical Fiber Sensors for Aircraft Structural Health Monitoring

Aircraft structures require periodic and scheduled inspection and maintenance operations due to their special operating conditions and the principles of design employed to develop them. Therefore, structural health monitoring has a great potential to reduce the costs related to these operations. Optical fiber sensors applied to the monitoring of aircraft structures provide some advantages over traditional sensors. Several practical applications for structures and engines we have been working on are reported in this article. Fiber Bragg gratings have been analyzed in detail, because they have proved to constitute the most promising technology in this field, and two different alternatives for strain measurements are also described. With regard to engine condition evaluation, we present some results obtained with a reflected intensity-modulated optical fiber sensor for tip clearance and tip timing measurements in a turbine assembled in a wind tunnel.

Design of mode scramblers for step-index and graded-index plastic optical fibers

We analyze the internal evolution of light power angular distribution in typical mode scrambling configurations by comparing the resultant far fields, obtained either experimentally or computationally, with the experimental equilibrium mode distribution (EMD) far field for the plastic optical fibers (POF) considered, so as to provide an insight that helps to adapt existing scramblers to new types of POF that are coming onto the market.

Geometric Optics Analysis of Multi-Step Index Optical Fibers

The double aim of the present article is to give a brief description of our research groups main results achieved in recent years and to provide a comprehensive analysis of light propagation properties in multi-step index (MSI) fibers based on the geometric optics method. Therefore, in the initial part we present our research team and its main lines of research on plastic optical fibers (POF). Afterward, the discussion focuses on a new theory we have developed for the propagation in MSI fibers. First of all, we derive the ray invariants ˜β and ˜l, which allow us to instantly determine the direction of the ray at any position along its trajectory, and we discuss the characteristics of the ray path, setting the classification of rays into bound, refracting and tunneling categories. Then, we calculate the ray-path parameters, namely the path length Lp, the ray half period zp and the ray transit time t. Furthermore, we analyze the ray temporal dispersion. Specifically, we take a practical case in which the width of each layer is maintained constant, allowing, in contrast, for the respective refractive indices to take any value, and we derive closed expressions for the ray dispersion. Finally, we investigate the light power acceptance properties of an MSI fiber, calculating the effectiveness of both diffuse and collimated light sources in launching bound rays and the coupling losses with lateral and longitudinal misalignments.

Spectroscopic Characterization of Plastic Optical Fibers Doped With Fluorene Oligomers

The optical properties of four fluorene oligomers embedded in plastic optical fiber have been investigated by using steady-state luminescence technique. In particular, we study the dependence of the optical spectra with dopant oligofluorene, emission wavelength, excitation wavelength, and light propagation distance through the fiber. Using this information, we have characterized the optical loss in these doped optical fibers.

Assessment of an LPG mPOF for Strain Sensing

We demonstrate the feasibility of long-period gratings (LPGs) written in microstructured polymer optical fibers (mPOFs) for detecting and measuring the strain rate and magnitude of engineering structures. We validate and compare the results of our experimental tests to a commercial fiber Bragg grating sensor. The encouraging results open the way to the use of LPG mPOF sensors in structural health monitoring applications.