(Abstract) The health monitoring of smart structures in civil engineering is becoming more and more important as in-situ structural monitoring would greatly reduce structure life-cycle costs and improve reliability. The distributed strain and temperature sensing is highly desired in large structures where strain and temperature at over thousand points need to be measured simultaneously. It is d...

We present a design, construction and characterization of different variations of GRIN and ball fiber lenses, which were recently proposed for ultra-small biomedical imaging probes. Those fiber lens modules are made of a single mode fiber and a GRIN or ball fiber lens with or without a fiber spacer between them. The lens diameters are smaller than 0.3 mm. We discuss design methods, fabrication ...

A Bessel-like beam was generated in a novel all-fiber integrated structure. A concentric ring intensity pattern was achieved by the multimode interference along the coreless silica fiber, which was then focused by the integrated micro-lens to result in a Bessel-like beam. The average beam diameter of 7.5 μm maintained over 500 μm axial length for a continuous wave Yb-doped fiber laser input osc...

Optical MEMS found various applications over the last years due to the rapidly increasing data rates in optical networks. As standard single-mode fibers are used, the required alignment tolerances are below 1 μm for optical fiber. The assembly and reliability of MOEMS devices requires increasing attention. Additionally, the trend is going from single-functionality devices to more complex subsys...

We present a new type of fiber Bragg grating (FBG) in which we etch the grating into the flat surface of a D-shaped optical fiber. Instead of being written in the core of the fiber, as are standard FBGs, these surface-relief FBGs are placed in the cladding above the core. These gratings are a viable alternative to standard FBGs for sensing applications. We describe the fabrication process for e...

We present the fabrication and characterization of fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs) in an endlessly single-mode microstructured polymer optical fiber (mPOF) made of humidity-insensitive high-Tg TOPAS cyclic olefin copolymer. The mPOF is the first made from grade 5013 TOPAS with a glass transition temperature of Tg = 135°C and we experimentally demonstrate high strain operation (2.5%) of the FBG at 9...