Phase generated carrier technique for fiber laser hydrophone

Abstract

A distributed feedback (DFB) fiber laser is compact, and is very suitable for using as a hydrophone to sense acoustic pressure. A DFB fiber laser hydrophone was researched. In the fiber laser hydrophone signal demodulating system, an unbalanced Michelson fiber interferometer and a Phase Generated Carrier (PGC) method were used. The PGC method can be used to demodulating the acoustic signal from the interference signal. Comparing with the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) method and Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) method, the digitized PGC method requires a greater amount of computation because of the high signal sampling, but it demands only one interference signal which makes the less fiber connections of the fiber laser hydrophone array. So the fiber laser hydrophone array based on the PGC method has lower complexity and higher reliability than that based on the NRL method or NPS method. The experimental results approve that the PGC method can demodulate acoustic signal between 20~2000 Hz frequency range with good signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) when the PZT driving frequency is 20 kHz.