A special optical fiber is investigated, which has a helical core in the cylindrical cladding. The beam propagation method （BPM） is used for analyzing the impacts of the geometric and physical parameters on the properties of mode losses of the helical-core fiber. The propagation loss is 0.32 dB/m for the fundamental mode and the propagation loss is 20.95 dB/m for the LPu mode in the wavelength range of 1050-1065 nm when the core diameter is 19 μm, the pitch of the core＇s helix is 2.66 mm, and the offset of the helix core from the center of the fiber axis is 31 μm. The core diameter of the single-mode helical-core fiber well exceeds that of the conventional large-mode-area fiber. The helical-core fiber can provide the effec- tive large-mode-area single-mode operation without coiling fiber or selecting excitation mode.
A compact fiber optic accelerometer based on a Michelson interferometer is proposed and demonstrated. In the proposed system, the sensing element consists of two single-mode fibers glued together by epoxy, which then act as a simple supported beam. By demodulating the optical phase shift, the acceleration is determined as proportional to the force applied on the central position of the two single-mode fibers. This simple model is able to calculate the sensitivity and the resonant frequency of the compact accelerometer. The experimental results show that the sensitivity and the resonant frequency of the accelerometer are 0.42 rad/g and 600 Hz, respectively.
