Simultaneous measurement three parameters of temperature, strain, and curvature by thin-core fiber based-Mach-Zehnder interferometer

Abstract

A Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) sensor for simultaneous measurement of three parameters is developed. The sensor structure is spliced by single-mode fiber, no-core fiber, thin-core fiber (TCF) and single-mode fiber in turn, where the sensing element is TCF. Due to the different core diameters of three types of optical fibers, the light in the transmission process excites a number of higher-order modes and interacts to form a mode interferometer. The interference spectrum produces many resonance peaks that are sensitive to different parameters. We select three resonant peaks sensitive to temperature, strain and bending for measuring temperature, strain and curvature. The experimental results display that the resonant wavelength of the sensor transmission spectrum drifts linearly as a function of the environmental parameters, with a maximum sensitivity of 248.7 pm/℃ for temperature, −2 pm/με for strain and −24.784 nm/m−1 for curvature. Selecting three resonance peaks to construct a measurement matrix realizes three-parameters simultaneous measurement and eliminates the cross-sensitivity among the three physical quantities. In addition, the proposed sensor possesses appealing characteristics of facile manufacturing process, compact size, high sensitivity, good linear fitting, robustness and low cost, and the sensor has a broad application prospect in the field of multi-parameter simultaneous measurement. In short, only one MZI in the optical fiber can realize the simultaneous monitoring of temperature, strain and bending, which provides a new solution for creating a compact multi-parameter sensor for structural health monitoring.