Tomographic Inspection of Fiber Coils Using Optical Coherence Tomography

We report the first study of using optical coherence tomography (OCT) to inspect the winding quality of fiber optical gyro coils. We use a swept-source OCT system to scan a quadrupole-wind fiber coil for obtaining its two-dimensional and three-dimensional (3D) tomographic images. The defects beneath the surface of the fiber coil, which otherwise are invisible by video inspection, can be clearly identified with such tomographic images. The winding quality of each layer can also be independently visualized with the reconstructed 3D images from different angles or in different sections. We believe that the proposed method will be useful to ensuring the quality production of each and every fiber gyro coil.