High temperature stable polymer planar waveguide Bragg grating sensors

We review our work on polymer planar waveguide Bragg grating (PPBG) sensors and demonstrate their potential for high temperature applications. Our sensors are fabricated with a rapid UV-based single writing step (SWS) technique, which allows for the simultaneous inscription of an integrated waveguide and a Bragg grating in polymer planar substrates. The developed SWS technique is applicable to different polymer materials with different material properties and allows a free selection of the planar substrate's geometry. In this contribution, we demonstrate the SWS technique and report on different PPBG sensor designs and application scenarios for high temperature sensing of up to 160°C as well as temperature referenced strain sensing.