Reliable wavelength detection method of sapphire fiber Bragg gratings using added multimode fiber

Abstract

Sapphire fiber Bragg gratings (SFBGs) are promising high-temperature sensors, which can be applied to measure temperature and strain in extreme environments. However, the multimode operation of SFBGs is susceptible to disturbance, leading to unreliable wavelength detection. Here, we propose by using added multimode fibers (AMMF) and tracing the longwave edge of reflection envelope to enhance the stability of wavelength detection for SFBG. The near-field profiles of transmission modes are investigated in sapphire fiber with different lengths of AMMF. It is found that the mode-field distribution of sapphire fiber can be improved by using AMMF with a length of 1000 m, which results in a reduction of relative standard deviation (RSD) from 57 % to 10 %. Then, the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in the reflection spectrum of SFBG is improved to 16 dB by polishing inclined end faces of sapphire fiber using the removal mechanism of hard-brittle materials. Furthermore, we detect the wavelengths of both the longwave edge and peak on the reflection envelope, which reveals lower fluctuations (i.e., SD = 0.02 nm) of the longwave edge, since lower-order modes are more stable during transmission. The effect of external disturbances (i.e., torsion and vibration) on demodulation of SFBG is also evaluated, with a maximum fluctuation of 0.06 nm (SD = 0.01 nm). A temperature experiment is carried out with the assembly and polynomial fitting curves with high fitness are obtained. Thus, our proposed methods enhance the reliability of wavelength detection in the reflection spectrum of SFBG, which is beneficial to improving the sensing performance of SFBG-based sensors.