A Variable Carrier Generation for Heterodyne LDV with an Optical Phase-locked Loop

Abstract

A heterodyne laser Doppler vibrometer (LDV) requires a frequency shifter to generate a carrier for the vibration information in the detector signal. The carrier frequency should be carefully selected in order to obtain the intended measurement range with a demodulation bandwidth that avoids existing noise sources. The traditional frequency shift in heterodyne LDV is realized with an acoustooptical modulator, which can only generate a fixed carrier frequency. In this paper, a variable carrier generation method based on an optical phase locked loop (OPLL) is demonstrated. Our setup implements a feedback loop to control the phase of the second laser to synchronize a reference laser. In lock-in status the carrier for the vibration information associated with a local oscillator signal. In this paper, we obtain the laser diode parameters relevant to performance and on the design of the photodetector and loop filter. Finally, the performance of the lock-in OPLL, variable carrier as well as velocity measurement is reported and the reliability of the proposed method is evaluated.