Fibre Bragg gratings in the visible: towards low-cost detection

The widespread use of smartphones forecasts huge increase in application-based portable sensors, particularly using the embedded light source and camera detector. Albeit Fibre Bragg gratings (FBG) were originally discovered at visible wavelengths, their commercial and scientific dissemination is predominant in the C-band of optical communications. Recently, several authors gave attention to FBG in the visible, aiming simpler and low-costly interrogation methods that could increase the application of FBG sensors in biomedicine, immunology and biophysics. We study the detection of VIS FBG using standard lamps or LEDs coupled to VIS, silicon based, CCDs in commercial instruments. We show that is possible to record the FBG spectrum with adequate signal to noise ratio,allowing hand held FBG interrogation methods in diverse environments.