Polymer fiber analysis and performance evaluation for short distance applications and medical sensing applications

Silica fiber and polymer optical fiber (POF) are electromagnetically intensive and can provide a huge wide bandwidth for sensing, monitoring, and endoscopic applications. A great advantage can be obtained due to a small size and array potential to provide discrete imaging speed improvement. While silica is more mature, POF has an important advantage over silica fiber that is silica fiber is a brittle material that would not be recommended to be used with the human body. The superior mechanical properties of POF not only reduce safety concern but also present the potential for greater sensitivity. Polymethylmetacrylate (PMMA), Polycarbonate (PC), Polystyrene (PS), and perfluorinated polymer fiber commonly referred to as Cyclic Transparent Optical Fiber (CYTOP) are leading different types of polymer fibers. In this paper the attenuation and Sellmeier coefficients for the different types of polymer fibers were analyzed and extracted. The extracted values were than utilized to model and simulate the attenuation and dispersion behavior of the polymer fibers. Moreover, OptiFiber simulator was used to simulate index profile of those different POF parameters. These results were then fed to the Optisystem simulation tool to model the application of POF in short distance data transmission system. The application of POF in medical sensing field was demonstrated by proposing a fiber-optic respiration sensor for respiratory monitoring.