ME 593

HW # 4

Due on April 22

1. (20 pts) Light from an 800 nm LED is coupled into a SM fiber with a core diameter of 8 m (Assume the confinement factor is very large). The fiber end was cut perfectly and a mirror is put parallel to the fiber end surface. 1) When the distance between the fiber end to the mirror is 20 m, calculate the spot size of the beam at the mirror. 2) How much light can be coupled back to the fiber?

2. (30 pts) An intensity based fiber optic distance sensor system is shown in Fig. 1. L1 and L2 are the fiber-mirror distances in the sensing arm and reference arm, respectively. Assume L2 is fixed and the change of L1 is the signal to be measured by the sensor. It is known that when the distance L1 is in the range of 10 m - 80 m the attenuation factor for the light reflected back to the fiber is a linear function of L1 and it decreases from 90% to 30%. Two identical photodiodes (D1 and D2) are used in the sensor system. The maximum the voltage output of D1 is 1.5 V. 1) If at a certain distance the voltage output of D1 changes to 0.5V, calculate this distance and the sensitivity of the sensor. 2) If the normalized RMS noise of the sensor is 20 nV / Hz and the bandwidth of the sensor is 1 MHz, calculate the SNR in linear scale and resolution of the sensor.