Realization and performance tests of a dual-polarization fiber optic gyroscope

Abstract

Interferometric fiber optical gyroscopes (IFOGs) have become one of the widely used sensors of inertial technology and rotational seismology, owing to their high precision and stability. In recent years, the dual-polarization IFOG, which allows two orthogonal polarization to work simultaneously, has been proved to achieve better measurement performance than the conventional minimum configuration through mutual compensation. In this work, a prototype of dualpolarization fiber-optic gyroscope is designed and realized. Laboratory tests show the self-noise has reached 9 nrad/s/sqrt(Hz) over the frequency from 0.01 to 125 Hz and the angular random walk has achieved 2.6×10^-5 deg/sqrt(hr). For an Open-loop IFOG, which does not need a confiscated feedback control system, it avoids the dead-zone of closedloop IFOG. However, limited by the measurement range, as a result of the periodic and nonlinear response of open-loop demodulation, the scale factor of open-loop IFOG varies around 100~1000 parts per million (ppm) conventionally, which hinders its detection accuracy. In this work, with new measurement extension and linearity compensation methods, the prototype achieves an outstanding precision with scale factor nonlinearity up to 5 ppm within ±10 deg/s, and shows the potential of dual-polarization IFOGs for rotational seismology.