Produção, estabilização e caracterização de redes fotorrefrativas de período longo em fibras óticas para sensores

• Ano de defesa: 2009
• Autor(a) principal: Costa, Rita Zanlorensi Visneck
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: por
• Instituição de defesa: Universidade Tecnológica Federal do Paraná; Curitiba; Programa de Pós-Graduação em Engenharia Elétrica e Informática Industrial
• Palavras-chave em Português: LPG (Redes de período longo); Detectores de fibras óticas; Fibras óticas; Engenharia elétrica; Fiber optics; Electric engineering
• Link de acesso: http://repositorio.utfpr.edu.br/jspui/handle/1/120

This work shows the implementation of a writing system for long-period gratings production, by using a side point-by-point ilumination with ultraviolet light, at Laser Laboratory in UTFPR. Gratings were written in optical fibers with a Nd: YAG laser operating at 266 nm. The spectral evolution of gratings was analyzed both during and after the writing process, along time intervals from 1 to 595 hours. The gratings were submitted to several characterizations aiming its application in physicochemical parameters sensing. For the assessment of gratings sensitivity to the external medium refractive index, fluid samples with refractice indices ranging from 1,0000 to 1.4315 were used. Changes of thermal sensitivity from negative do positive values were quantified, for temperature variations up to 24°C, with behaviours transitioning from linear to nonlinear, depending on the refractive index of external medium. For the studies of sensitivities of longitudinal strain, the analyzed grating showed a low sensitivity value of -0,19±0,15 pm/µe in the range between 0 to 125 µe. A thermal characterization of the produced devices was carried out with a thermo element Peltier and with a laboratory furnace. For the Peltier the gratings were submitted to thermal cycles from -1,5°C to 61.1°C. For the furnace the gratings were exposed to temperatures between 25°C a 1200°C without completely erased. An experimental issue was the investigation about the thermal stabilization of gratings. Two different processes to reach the thermal stabilization were studied: annealing and quenching. The former consisted of annealing cycles with slow cooling whereas the later comprised of thermal cycles with sudden cooling from a maximum temperature of 425°C, the second one revealing to be more efficient to reach the thermal stabilization. The stabilized grating showed a non-linear thermal sensitivity ranging from -0,044 nm/°C within the temperature range from 20°C to 300°C. Owing to the inherent asymmetric characteristics of the process employed to record the gratings, the viability of using such devices as transducers for curvature sensing in different directions was studied, employing artificial neural networks to analyze the data.