TY - JOUR A1 - Stajanca, Pavol A1 - Topolniak, Ievgeniia A1 - Pötschke, Samuel A1 - Krebber, Katerina T1 - Solution-mediated cladding doping of commercial polymer optical fibers N2 - Solution doping of commercial polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) polymer optical fibers (POFs) is presented as a novel approach for preparation of custom cladding-doped POFs (CD-POFs). The presented method is based on a solution-mediated diffusion of dopant molecules into the fiber cladding upon soaking of POFs in a methanol-dopant solution. The method was tested on three different commercial POFs using Rhodamine B as a fluorescent dopant. The dynamics of the diffusion process was studied in order to optimize the doping procedure in terms of selection of the most suitable POF, doping time and conditions. Using the optimized procedure, longer segment of fluorescent CD-POF was prepared and its performance was characterized. Fiber’s potential for sensing and illumination applications was demonstrated and discussed. The proposed method represents a simple and cheap way for fabrication of custom, short to medium length CD-POFs with various dopants. KW - Polymer optical fiber KW - Solution doping KW - Polymethyl methacrylate KW - Rhodamine B KW - Dye-doped fiber KW - Fluorescent optical fiber PY - 2018 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:b43-441045 SN - 1068-5200 SN - 1095-9912 VL - 41 SP - 227 EP - 234 PB - Elsevier Inc. AN - OPUS4-44104 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER -