Coupling of Modes in Step-Index Plastic Optical Fibers by Using D-Shape Technique

• Published in: Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) Vol. 24; no. 9; p. 2707
• Main Authors: Silva, Cláudio Márcio F, Pacheco, Gefeson M, Panasiewicz, Jognes, Ramirez, Luis A Rabanal
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland MDPI AG 01.05.2024
• Subjects: D shape; Drone aircraft; Embedded systems; Energy; Equipment and supplies; Fiber optics; Home networks; Light; Manufacturing; Methods; POF; Propagation; Spectrum allocation; steady-state distribution (SSD); Unmanned aerial vehicles; D shape; POF; steady-state distribution (SSD)
• ISSN: 1424-8220; 1424-8220
• DOI: 10.3390/s24092707

This article presents a technique for reducing the stabilization length of steady-state modes in step-index plastic optical fibers (POFs), which is significant for sensor networks, Internet of Things, signal processing, and data fusion in sensor systems. The results obtained with the com- putational tool developed suggest that the D-shape created in the POF effectively reduces the stabi- lization length of the modes and, by extension, minimizes the dispersion effects of the modes by filtering out high-order modes. Applying the analysis to commercial POFs, the authors experimen- tally verified a reduction in the stabilization length of modes from 27 to 10 m and from 20 m to 5 m. Reducing the mode stabilization length minimizes the bit error rate (BER) in short-length SI-POF- based optical links operating at 250 Mbp/s. A reduction from 7.6 × 10 to 3.7 × 10 was achieved.