Abstract
The systematic investigation on the tensile strain characterization of polymer optical fibre Bragg gratings is reported in this paper. Experimental results indicate that a very large Bragg wavelength tuning range (32 nm) with good reproducibility, reversibility and repeatability can be achieved by applying the simple tension on polymer fibre Bragg gratings. It is also demonstrated that the strain sensitivity of polymer fibre Bragg gratings is larger than that of silica fibre Bragg gratings. As a result, the strain characterization study shows the great potential of polymer fibre Bragg gratings in both WDM optical communications and fibre strain sensing applications.