Opto-mechanical Fiber Optic Sensors

5

Distributed Brillouin Sensing Using Polymer Optical Fibers

Yosuke Mizuno, Neisei Hayashi, and Kentaro Nakamura     Tokyo Institute of Technology, Yokohama, Japan

Abstract

We review some unique characteristics of Brillouin scattering in polymer optical fibers (POFs), and demonstrate POF-based Brillouin sensing of strain and temperature distributions. Basic characterization shows that the Brillouin frequency shift (BFS) measured at telecommunication wavelength is approximately 2.8 GHz, which varies depending on strain and temperature with negative coefficients of −122 MHz/% and −4.1 MHz/K, respectively. These are −0.2 and −3.5 times the values in silica glass fibers, indicating that the Brillouin scattering in POFs can be exploited to develop highly ...