Spectrally-resolved distributed optical fibre bolometry

Abstract

We propose a fully distributed optical fiber sensor capable of performing spectrally-resolved detection of visible light radiation. The sensor is based on monitoring the temperature change between two optical fibers with different coating colors. In our implementation, the temperature is simultaneously monitored in a black-coated fiber (which is highly sensitive to all input wavelengths) and a color-coated fiber, which basically acts as an optical stop-band filter for a certain input color. By comparing the temperature behavior attained for each fiber, it is possible to obtain information of the wavelength/color of a given optical radiation present in the environment. Suitable calibration could lead to distributed colorimetry measurements.