High-T_g TOPAS microstructured polymer optical fiber for fiber Bragg grating strain sensing at 110 degrees

We present the fabrication and characterization of fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs) in an endlessly single-mode microstructured polymer optical fiber (mPOF) made of humidity-insensitive high-Tg TOPAS cyclic olefin copolymer. The mPOF is the first made from grade 5013 TOPAS with a glass transition temperature of Tg = 135 degrees C and we experimentally demonstrate high strain operation (2.5%) of the FBG at 98 degrees C and stable operation up to a record high temperature of 110 degrees C. The Bragg wavelengths of the FBGs are around 860 nm, where the propagation loss is 5.1dB/m, close to the fiber loss minimum of 3.67dB/m at 787nm. (C) 2013 Optical Society of Americ

Effective dose conversion coefficients for radionuclides exponentially distributed in the ground.

In order to provide fundamental data required for dose evaluation due to environmental exposures, effective dose conversion coefficients, that is, the effective dose rate per unit activity per unit area, were calculated for a number of potentially important radionuclides, assuming an exponential distribution in ground, over a wide range of relaxation depths. The conversion coefficients were calculated for adults and a new-born baby on the basis of dosimetric methods that the authors and related researchers have previously developed, using Monte Carlo simulations and anthropomorphic computational phantoms. The differences in effective dose conversion coefficients due to body size between the adult and baby phantoms were found to lie within 50 %, for most cases; however, for some low energies, differences could amount to a factor of 3. The effective dose per unit source intensity per area was found to decrease by a factor of 2-5, for increasing relaxation depths from 0 to 5 g/cm(2), above a source energy of 50 keV. It is also shown that implementation of the calculated coefficients into the computation of the tissue weighting factors and the adult reference computational phantoms of ICRP Publication 103 does not significantly influence the effective dose conversion coefficients of the environment. Consequently, the coefficients shown in this paper could be applied for the evaluation of effective doses, as defined according to both recommendations of ICRP Publications 103 and 60