Study of Macrobending Losses Effect in Plastic Optical Fibber.

Abstract

Experimental study to analyze the effect of macrobending losses in plastic optical fiber triple bending model based on PC (personal computer) has been conducted. The data is gathered by measuring the change of the light intensity due to the presence of bending on optical fibers. The bending causes losses of optical fiber that is read by WIM (weight in motion) Acquisition program based on Borlan Delphi 7. The optical fibers are plastic with diameter of 3 mm. The diameter of pin is 8 mm and the space between the pin is 5 mm. The light source is a LED ( λ =676 nm). As a result, the losses of optical fiber increase with the enhancement of bending. The increase trend linear to sensitivity of the sensor with gradient of 0,1063 and R 2 of 0,9626. Therefore, the proposed design might be applied as a WIM sensor.