Sampled chirped fiber gratings as distributed pressure sensors

Abstract

Fiber gratings have been studied for their applications in sensing and communications. Many sensing applications of the uniform fiber Bragg grating, chirped fiber grating and long period grating have been studied, proposed and commercialized. Sampled chirped gratings have been studied for multichannel dispersion compensation in DWDM systems. In this paper, we show that the sampled chirped fiber grating can be used as a distributed pressure sensor. The chirp provides ease of manufacture of many gratings. The sampling results in many small, uniform grating-like structures. This fact can be used to simulate a distributed sensor over the length of the sampled chirped grating. When a surface comes into contact with the sensor, the distribution of the pressure determines the shift in central wavelength of the various sub-gratings. The sub-grating that experiences the maximum pressure will show maximum wavelength shift whereas adjacent sub-gratings will show less shift. This can also give the location of the pressure. The sensor design comprises of a sampled chirped grating embedded in unidirectional fiber-reinforced composite prepreg. The prepreg enhances the mechanical strength and the unidirectional embedding reduces birefringence. The number of layers in the prepreg stack varies the sensitivity. Such distributed pressure sensors can be applied in robotics, ergonomics, and in the biomedical field.