Composite Fabry–Perot interferometric gas pressure and temperature sensor utilizing four hole fiber with sensitivity boosted by high-order harmonic Vernier effect

It is an enormous challenge for optical fiber sensors to intuitively achieve the simultaneous measurement of both gas pressure and temperature with high sensitivity. To address this challenge, the Fabry–Perot interferometer (FPI) based on high-order harmonic Vernier effect is combined with the fiber Bragg grating (FBG). A novel fiber sensor built with a cascaded FPI and an FBG for the simultaneous measurement of gas pressure and temperature is designed and experimentally investigated by virtue of the temperature sensing property of FBG and its independence on gas pressure-induced refractive index change, where a high-order harmonic Vernier effect was utilized to boost the gas pressure sensitivity of the sensor. As gas pressure increases from 0 to 1 MPa, the internal envelope of composite FBG and FPI based 10-order harmonic Vernier effect exhibits redshift with maximal sensitivities of 146.64 nm/MPa and a high magnification factor of 43. FBG is insensitive to gas pressure change, whereas, the spectral response of the internal envelope 10-order harmonic Vernier effect and FBG monotonously move and undergo blueshift and redshift as the temperature increases from 30 °C to 120 °C with maximal sensitivities of −0.48 and 0.011 nm/°C, respectively. Therefore, the distinct sensitivities of FBG and FPI to gas pressure and temperature result in extraction of both gas pressure and temperature information simultaneously by constructing measurement matrixes.