High-precision temperature-compensated fiber Bragg grating axial strain sensing system based on a dual-loop optoelectronic oscillator with the enhanced Vernier effect

Abstract

A temperature-compensated fiber Bragg grating (FBG) axial strain sensor based on a two-dual-loop optoelectronic oscillator (OEO) with the enhanced Vernier effect is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. The sensing head consists of two cascaded FBGs, one of which acts as a sensing FBG to measure both the axial strain and temperature and the other as a reference FBG to detect temperature. Acting as the optical carrier, the reflected optical signal of the sensing head is divided into two paths with opposite dispersion coefficients and slightly different lengths to achieve an enhanced Vernier effect. After being divided by a wavelength division multiplexer, the optical signal launches into two electrical paths with different electrical bandpass filters (EBPFs) for frequency division multiplexing. The EBPF I selects the microwave signal generated by the sensing FBG, while the EBPF II selects the microwave signal generated by the reference FBG. Therefore, the axial strain and temperature can be recovered by recording the microwave frequency within EBPF I, and the temperature can be interrogated by tracking the microwave frequency within EBPF II. The axial strain applied on the sensing FBG can be distinguished by solving the cross-sensitivity matrix. The results show that the sensitivity of the dual-loop OEO is much greater than that of the single-loop OEO. The maximum measurement error for the axial strain is 0.112µε, and the maximum temperature compensation error is as low as 0.024°C in the dual-loop OEO, which is far less than that in the single-loop OEO. The enhanced Vernier effect not only improves the sensitivity, but also reduces the temperature compensation error.