High performance all-fiber temperature sensor based on coreless side-polished fiber wrapped with polydimethylsiloxane

A novel fiber structure, coreless side-polished fiber (CSPF) that is wrapped by polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), is demonstrated to be highly sensitive to temperature because of the high refractive index sensitivity of the CSPF and the large thermal optic coefficient of the PDMS. Our numerical and experimental results show that the several dips in the transmitted spectra of PDMSW-CSPF is originated from the multimode interference (MMI) in the CSPF and will blueshift with the increase of temperature. Furthermore, for such a PDMSW-CSPF, we investigate its temperature sensing characteristics and the influences of residual thickness (RT) and dip wavelength on the sensitivity both numerically and experimentally. In the temperature range of 30~85°C, the PDMSW-CSPF with RT = 43.26 μm exhibits a high temperature sensitivity of -0.4409 nm/°C, the high linearity of 0.9974, and the high stability with low standard deviation of 0.141 nm. Moreover, in the cycle experiments, where the environmental temperature was set to automatically increase and then decrease, the PDMSW-CSPF exhibits a low relative deviation of sensitivity (RSD) of down to ± 0.068%. Here, the RSD is defined as the ratio of sensitivity deviation to the average sensitivity measured in the heating/cooling cycle experiments. The lower RSD indicates that PDMSW-CSPF has better reversibility than other fiber structure. The investigations also show that the sensitivity of the PDMSW-CSPF could be enhanced further by reducing the residual thickness and choosing the dip at a longer wavelength.