Design of a high voltage source to fabricate fiber optic arc induced gratings

Abstract

In this paper we propose a high voltage source which is controlled by a communication port I/O of a data acquisition card. The graphical programming language LabView is employed for this task. We make use of this source to produce optical fiber gratings by inducing an electric arc with the point by point procedure. It has a control section to modify the arc duration time and thus the voltage and current applied to the fiber by means of two electrodes. The experimental setup by which we characterized the gratings is depicted and we also present the transmitting spectrum. The gratings were fabricated with SMF-28 fiber but microstructured fiber can be exploited too. These gratings can be used with optical fiber lasers as optical filters and in the implementation of optical sensors.