Abstract

The idea of fabricating fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs) during the drawing of a fiber dates back more than 20 years. Because of the high technology requirements it took more than 10 years to develop the method into a reliable process. During the last five years the improvements in the technical development enabled a cost effective industrial production of draw tower gratings (DTG®s) for the use in fiber optic sensing and telecommunication. We report about new possibilities and the production of low reflective DTGs for the use of optical frequency domain reflectometry (OFDR). Furthermore we describe the design, fabrication and testing of a polarization maintaining fiber with DTG inscription. This special fiber type can be used for the separating of strain and temperature.

© 2014 Optical Society of America