Thermal profile detection through high-sensitivity fiber optic chirped Bragg grating on microstructured PMMA fiber

[EN] In this work, a linearly chirped fiber Bragg grating (CFBG) inscribed in a microstructured polymer optical fiber (mPOF) has been demonstrated for detecting temperature pro- files during thermal treatments. A CFBG of 10 mm length and 0.98 nm bandwidth has been inscribed in a mPOF fiber by means of a KrF laser and uniform phase mask. The CFBG has a high temperature sensitivity of -191.4 pm/°C). The CFBG has been used as a semi-distributed temperature sensor, capable of detecting the temperature profile along the grating length, for scenarios that account minimally invasive biomedical treatments. Two experiments have been designed to validate the CFBG tem- perature reconstruction, using a linear gradient, and a research- grade radiofrequency ablation (RFA) setup to apply Gaussian- shaped temperature spatial profiles. The result is that the higher sensitivity of the CFBG supports the detection of spatially non- uniform temperature fields by means of spectral reconstruction.
This work was supported in part by Nazarbayev University, Research Council (ORAU project LIFESTART), in part by Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia (FCT)/MEC through National funds and when applicable co-funded by FEDER PT2020 partnership agreement under the project UID/EEA/50008/2013, and in part by the Research Excellence Award Programme GVA PROMETEO 2017/103 FUTURE MICROWAVE PHOTONIC TECHNOLOGIES AND APPLICATIONS. The work of C. Marques was supported by FCT through the fellowship SFRH/BPD/109458/2015.