High-sensitivity temperature sensor based on a droplet-like fiber circle.

A low-cost yet high-sensitivity temperature fiber sensor is proposed and demonstrated in this paper. A single-mode fiber with coating is simply bent in a droplet-like circle with a radius of several millimeters. The strong bending induces mode interferences between the silica core mode and the excited modes propagating in the polymer coating. Many resonant dips were observed in the transmission spectra and are found to shift to a shorter wavelength with the increase of environmental temperature. Our linear fitting result of the experimental data shows that the proposed sensor presents high temperature sensitivity up to -3.102  nm/°C, which is even comparable with sensors based on selective liquid-filled photonic crystal fibers. Such high temperature sensitivity results from the large thermo-optical coefficient difference between the silica core and the polymer coating. The influence of a circle radius to the sensitivities is also discussed.