Demodulation of a Fiber Bragg Grating Sensor System Based on a Linear Cavity Multi-wavelength Fiber Laser

A fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensor demodulation scheme based on a multi-wavelength erbium-doped fiber laser (EDFL) with linear cavity configuration is presented and demonstrated. The scheme is one linear fiber laser cavity with two FBG sensors as its filters. One is for strain sensing, and the other one is for temperature compensation. A power-symmetric nonlinear optical loop mirror (NOLM) is utilized in the laser in order to suppress the mode competition and hole-burning effect to lase two wavelengths output that correspond with two FBG sensors. The sensing quantity, which is demodulated by spectrometer, is represented by the output wavelength shift of the EDFL with temperature and strain applying on FBG sensors. In the experiment, strain measurement with a minimize resolution of 0.746 με, i.e. 0.9pm and adjustable linear sensitivity are achieved. Due to utilizing the linear cavity multi-wavelength EDFL with a NOLM as the light source, the scheme also exhibits important advantages including obviously high signal and noise ratio (SNR) of 40.467dB and low power consuming comparing with common FBG sensors with broadband light as the light source.