The project is looking at developing optical storage for aerospace and evaluates different methods to implement this technology. The project involves the practical writing as well as establishing an encoding scheme and a physical system that fulfils the standards of aerospace.

Presents details on fabrication, interrogation systems and encoding schemes to develop an optical storage for aerospace based on Direct UV written (DUW) Bragg gratings. Experimental work has been carried out starting from the fabrication of wafers with Flame Hydrolysis Deposition to create photosensitive chips and integrated optical fibre (IOF) for UV writing. Further work has been performed to gain a better understanding of the fibre Bragg gratings written with the DUW system. This has led to a successful classification of the different grating types in GF4A into the framework that is commonly used within the field. This has been realised by thermally regenerating the gratings and analysing their spectral behaviour. Due to the unique writing technique this has previously not been realised. Classifying gratings in SMF28 is still in progress. An experimental set-up to thermally treat IOF to increase its temperature stability has also been implemented. A first approach to interrogate Bragg gratings on a planar chip using Optical Frequency Domain Reectrometry (OFDR) has been attempted. The spatial constraint on chip has found to be a limiting factor and further work focuses on introducing this technique to the fibre platform.