Numerical and experimental study of a multimode optical fiber sensor based on Fresnel reflection at the fiber tip for refractive index measurement

This paper presents the numerical and experimental study of a multimode optical fiber (MMF) sensor based on Fresnel reflection at the fiber tip. Considering different modal power distributions (uniform mode distribution, gaussian and equilibrium mode distribution), the effective fraction of the incident light reflected at the interface between the end of the fiber and the surrounding medium is first calculated numerically with a ray model. Even when considering modal power distribution and non-normal incidence influence, simplifying assumptions such as normal incidence hypothesis can be made to facilitate experimental data exploitation, with a maximum error on the deduced medium refractive index of the 10(-4) order. A statistical analysis of noise is then made, to study the influence of a random noise between 0.1% and 5% noise level: results show that the approximation error made by using normal incidence formula for a Fresnel sensor based on a MMF is significantly smaller than the repeatability error. These assumptions are then verified experimentally with two experimental setups by measuring the refractive index at 1550 nm of reference solutions (distilled water-isopropanol and distilled water-sodium chloride mixtures) with a Fresnel based on a multimode fiber, and a Fresnel based on single-mode fiber for comparison. Good agreement is found with refractive index values from the literature with a maximum relative difference of only 0.1%, and the maximum experimental uncertainties in this work is 1.1 x 10(-4). Differences between refractive index measured with a Fresnel based on single-mode and multimode fiber are found to be in accordance with values from the statistical study.