The real-time power information from the power plants and substations are required for smart grid infrastructure. However, the conventional current sensors are vulnerable to external electromagnetic interference (EMI) and surge current. Therefore, optical current sensors have received high attention for their advantages over the conventional system. Optical current sensors have various merits of insulating sensor materials, linear response over wide current range, and light weight for easy installment. Furthermore, they can be produced in small footprints and are immune to the external EMI, and they can be used in high power capacity. The only disadvantage of optical current sensor is the complicated interferometry structure, which could be resolved by adopting integrated optics. In this work, we designed and fabricated a polymeric integrated-optic device for producing the polarization rotated reflection interferometry (PRRI). By adopting integrated optics, the PRRI could be fabricated by a simple process and is advantageous for mass production. The polymeric waveguide device consists of phase modulators, TE-pass polarizers, directional couplers, and polarization converters integrated on a single chip. It was fabricated through a conventional semiconductor fabrication process, such as photolithography, spin-coating, UV-curing, etc. Finally, the fabricated polymeric integrated optic current sensor exhibited excellent linearity, fast response time, and high accuracy satisfying the 0.2 accuracy class (IEC 60044-8).
Polymer waveguide optical phased array (OPA) beam scanners can achieve stable beam steering with low driving power owing to the large TO coefficient and low thermal conductivity of the polymer material. However, polymeric OPAs with low refractive index contrast exhibit narrow field-of-view (FOV) because of the wide pitch of the output waveguide channels compared to their counterparts of Si and silicon nitride (SiN) photonic integrated circuit platforms. Meanwhile, SiN waveguides offer stronger mode confinement with smaller waveguide core sizes than polymer waveguides, and they can handle high optical power without nonlinear effects. Through monolithic integration of polymer and SiN waveguides using adiabatic transition tapers, a high-performance phase modulator (PM) is achieved for the purpose of demonstrating an OPA device with low power consumption, wide scanning angle, and fast response.
The phase error imposed on the optical phased arrays (OPAs) used for the beam scanner of LiDAR is unavoidable due to the minute dimensional fluctuations that occur during the waveguide manufacturing process. In this study, a fast-reacting beamforming algorithm is developed based on the rotating element vector method for compensating the phase error. The proposed algorithm is highly suitable for the OPA devices comprised of polymer waveguides, allowing each phase modulator to be controlled independently. Additionally using the least square approximation, the beamforming time is shortened to 16 seconds for a 32-channel polymer waveguide OPA device.
Optical phased array (OPA) beam scanners consisting of polymer waveguides have demonstrated precise beam steering with low driving power by taking advantage of the large TO coefficient of the polymer material. However, the slow response time of thermo-optic phase modulators limits the beam scanning time, and it has to be improved for the practical LiDAR application. In this study, a polyimide with a high refractive index is adopted to produce a waveguide with a small waveguide core size to reduce the response time of the thermo-optic phase modulator and improve the beam scanning speed of the OPA device.
Since the integrated optic current sensor (IOCS) is made of various optical components as a waveguide, it has advantages of small volume, reduced manufacturing cost, and is advantageous for mass production. In this work, we demonstrate the tolerance of device performance for providing stable sensing operation in long-term sensing experiment.
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