Optoelectronic Oscillator for Physical Length Measurement of PMMA Plastic Optical Fibers

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this paper describes the first demonstration of an unconventional but simple and low-cost optoelectronic oscillator (OEO) for measuring the physical length of step-index PMMA plastic optical fibers. The technique relies on free-spectral range measurements obtained from the OEO. The calibration was performed using POF samples with physical lengths ranging from 0.15 to 26.30 m. Measurement of POF length using the proposed technique presented ~1% relative error.