Abstract
Fiber-optic sensors, especially fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensors are very attractive due to their numerous advantages over traditional sensors, such as light weight, high sensitivity, cost-effectiveness, immunity to electromagnetic interference, ease of multiplexing and so on. Therefore, fiber-optic sensors have been intensively studied during the last several decades. Nowadays, with the development of novel fiber technology, more and more newly invented fiber technologies bring better and superior performance to fiber-optic sensing networks. In this paper, the applications of some advanced photonic technologies including fiber lasers and microwave photonic technologies for fiber sensing applications are reviewed. FBG interrogations based on several kinds of fiber lasers, especially the novel Fourier domain mode locking fiber laser, have been introduced; for the application of microwave photonic technology, examples of microwave photonic filtering utilized as a FBG sensing interrogator and microwave signal generation acting as a transversal loading sensor have been given. Both theoretical analysis and experimental demonstrations have been carried out. The comparison of these advanced photonic technologies for the applications of fiber sensing is carried out and important issues related to the applications have been addressed and the suitable and potential application examples have also been discussed in this paper.
Highlights
Fiber optics sensors have been a very attractive technology due to their overwhelming advantages in industrial applications, such as compactness, light weight, high sensitivity, immunity to electromagnetic interference, the ease of multiplexing and so on
We can summarize some characteristics of the SL-Fourier domain mode locking (FDML) fiber laser: the output spectrum is determined by the fiber Bragg grating (FBG); the lasing wavelengths can be chosen by adjusting the driving frequency of the tunable filter; two pulses appear within one driving period and the pulse position in time is determined by the center wavelength of the FBG; lasing at two or more wavelengths is possible once the FBGs are arranged close enough to each other
We have reviewed the applications of advanced photonic technologies, such as fiber lasers and microwave photonic technology in fiber sensing network
Summary
Fiber optics sensors have been a very attractive technology due to their overwhelming advantages in industrial applications, such as compactness, light weight, high sensitivity, immunity to electromagnetic interference, the ease of multiplexing and so on. With the dramatically increasing research on fiber technology, the research on some advanced photonic technologies such as fiber lasers and microwave photonics technology has started to help realize novel fiber optic sensing applications. Photonic generation of microwave signals of up to 40 GHz by using optical four wave mixing and fiber Bragg gratings has been reported [26]; photonic generation by using dual-wavelength fiber ring lasers has been proposed and demonstrated [27,28,29,30,31]. A photonic bandpass filter with high skirt selectivity and stopband attenuation has been proposed in [35,36] by using a novel dual-cavity bandpass optical structure based on two pairs of active fiber Bragg grating cavities, which formed an infinite impulse response (IIR) filter. The remainder of this review article will be divided into three parts: in the first part, the fiber laser technology and its applications in sensing systems will be reviewed; in the second part, the microwave photonic technology and its applications in sensing systems will be reviewed; come the conclusions
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