A highly sensitive directional bending sensor based on a three-core fiber (TCF) Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) is presented in this study. This MZI-based bending sensor was fabricated by fusion-splicing a section of TCF between two single-mode fibers (SMF) with core-offset. Due to the location of the core in the TCF, a bend applied to the TCF-based MZI led to an elongation or shortening of the core, which makes the sensor suitable for directional bending measurement. To analyze the bending characteristics, two types of TCF-based sensors, with the fusion-spliced core located at different positions between the SMFs, were investigated. A swept source was employed in the measurement technique. The experimental results showed that, for the two types of sensors in this setup, the bending sensitivities of the two sensors were 15.36 nm/m−1 and 3.11 nm/m−1 at the bending direction of 0°, and −20.48 nm/m−1 and −5.29 nm/m−1 at the bending direction of 180°. The temperature sensitivities of the two sensors were 0.043 nm/°C and 0.041 nm/°C, respectively. The proposed sensors are compact, versatile, inexpensive to fabricate, and are expected to have potential applications in biomedical sensing.
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