A Dual-Wavelength Fiber Laser Sensor with Temperature and Strain Discrimination

Abstract

This work presents a dual-wavelength C-band erbium-doped fiber laser assisted by an artificial backscatter reflector. This fiber-based reflector, inscribed by femtosecond laser direct writing, was fabricated into a single mode fiber with a length of 32 mm. The dual-wavelength laser obtained, centered at 1527.7 nm and 1530.81 nm, showed an optical signal-to-noise ratio over 46 dB when pumped at 150 mW. Another feature of this laser was that the power difference between the two channels was just 0.02 dB, regardless of the pump power, resulting in a dual emission laser with high equalization. On the other hand, an output power level and a central wavelength instability as low as 0.3 dB and 0.01 nm were measured, in this order for both channels. Moreover, the threshold pump power was 40 mW. Finally, the performance of this dual-wavelength fiber laser enhanced with a random reflector for sensing applications was studied, achieving the simultaneous measurement of strain and temperature with sensitivities around 1 pm/με and 9.29 pm/°C, respectively.

Fiber Laser Sensor Configurations for Refractive Index, Temperature and Strain: A Review

“…At this point, it can be appreciated that strain was one of the first parameters employed to demonstrate fiber laser sensors [13,15,24,117]. Moreover, several fiber laser sensor configurations have been proposed to simultaneously detect strain and other parameters [39,98,103,[118][119][120][121][122][123][124]. Some fiber laser sensors based on FBG have been demonstrated for pure strain sensing [125,126].…”

Review of Random Fiber Lasers for Optical Fiber Sensors

“…Since RFL was proposed, many researchers have explored the physical mechanism, output characteristics, and implementation methods of RFL. RFL has been well applied in fields such as supercontinuum spectroscopy [17][18][19][20], speckle free imaging [21][22][23][24][25][26], fiber communication [27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36], and fiber sensing [37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50]. Especially in the field of fiber optic sensing, RFL exhibits significant advantages in fiber optic sensing systems due to its simple structure, narrow linewidth, and low noise.…”