An OM1 optical fiber as a mechanical sensor for high impact measurements

The OM1 fibers are commodity and could be found in legacy systems, such as Ethernet, FDDI, or ATM. These fibers are suitable for mechanical sensor applications due to their big numerical aperture. Unfortunately, their mode field cannot be expressed analytically and therefore, calculation of macro bend loss sensing capability requires numerical or experimental techniques. It is shown that OM1 has low temperature and pressure sensitivity during embedding process. On the other hand, sensor dynamic is promising, so OM1 could be used for fast measurements such as bullet impact on the host material.