Fast and reliable interrogation of USFBG sensors based on MG-Y laser discrete wavelength channels

Abstract

In this letter, we propose to use discrete wavelength channels of a single chip MG-Y laser to interrogate an ultra-short fiber Bragg grating with a wide Gaussian spectrum. The broadband Gaussian spectrum of USFBG is sampled by the wavelength channels of MG-Y laser, through which the center of the spectrum. The measurement inherits the important features of a common tunable laser interrogation technique, namely its high flexibility, natural insensitivity to intensity variations relative to common intensity-based approaches. While for traditional tunable laser methods, it requires to sweep the whole spectrum to obtain the center wavelength of the spectrum, for the proposed scheme, just a few discrete wavelength channels of laser are needed to be acquired, which leads to significant improvements of the efficiency and measurement speed. This reliable and low cost concept could offer the good foundation for USFBGs future applications in large scale distributed measurements, especially in time domain multiplexing scheme.