Presentation Information
[15p-PA3-14]Investigation of Two-Step RIE Process for Fabricating Long-Period Gratings on Perfluorinated Plastic Optical Fibers
〇Keito Ishida1, Motoki Kochi2, Koyo Shibuta2, Heeyoung Lee3, Yosuke Mizuno4, Daisuke Yamane1,2 (1.Rits GSSE, 2.Rits, 3.SIT, 4.YNU)
Keywords:
Perfluorinated Plastic Optical Fibers,Long Period Gratings Sensor,Strain Sensor
This research introduces a "two-step RIE process" to fabricate Long-Period Gratings (LPG) on Perfluorinated Plastic Optical Fibers (PF-POF) for strain sensing. Existing shadow mask methods take nearly 16 hours to process due to the fiber's thick polycarbonate reinforcement layer. To address this, we proposed a split process. First, a maskless pre-etching step reduces the fiber diameter from 490 µm to 210 µm (6 hours) to efficiently remove the reinforcement layer and approach the core. Second, a shadow mask is applied to etch periodic grooves (30 µm depth) to form the LPG structure (2 hours). This method significantly reduces the total processing time while successfully forming the required periodic structures near the core. Future work will focus on evaluating the sensor performance of the fabricated fibers.