Speckle-based interrogation system for quasi-distributed weak fiber Bragg gratings

A simple quasi-distributed fiber sensing interrogation system based on random speckles is proposed for weak fiber Bragg gratings (WFBGs) in this work. Without using tunable lasers or spectrometers, a piece of multimode fiber is applied to interrogate the WFBGs relying on the wavelength sensitivity of speckles. Instead of the CCD sensor, an InGaAs quadrant detector serves as the receiver to capture the fast-changing speckle patterns. A supervised deep learning algorithm of the multilayer perceptron architecture is implemented to process speckle data and to interrogate temperature changes or dynamic strains. The proposed demodulation system is experimentally demonstrated for WFBGs with 0.1% reflectivity. The experimental results demonstrate that the new system is capable of measuring temperature change with an accuracy of 1°C and achieving dynamic frequency of 100 Hz. This speckle-based interrogation system paves a new way for distributed WFBGs sensing with a simple design.