Multi-Parameter Sensing Based On In-Line Mach-Zehnder Interferometer
Creators: name: Xu, Yanping
Publisher: name: Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa
Year: 2013
Subjects: Optical fiber sensors
in-line fiber Mach-Zehnder interferometer

description: Optical fiber sensors have been intensively studied and successfully employed in various human social activities and daily living, such as industrial production, civil engineering, medicine, transportation, national defense and so on. According to different structures, optical sensors could be divided into various categories. This thesis focuses on studying different kinds of in-line fiber Mach-Zehnder interferometers, which have played an important role among the optical interferometric fiber sensors. The structure composition, fabrication process, physical principle and practical applications of two novel in-line fiber Mach-Zehnder interferometers are proposed and discussed in detail in this work. The tapered bend-insensitive fiber Mach-Zehnder interferometer (BIF-MZI) is firstly fabricated and used as a fiber vibrometer. The unique double-cladding structure of bend-insensitive fiber not only provides higher mechanical strength to the sensor, but also guarantees a more uniform transmission spectrum， since only a few inner-cladding modes are left interfering with the core mode. A high sensitivity and fast response intensity demodulation scheme is employed by monitoring the power fluctuation of the BIF-MZI at the operation wavelength. Both damped and continuous vibrations are detected using the proposed sensor. It is demonstrated that this sensor responses to an extremely wide range of frequencies from 1 Hz up to 500 kHz with high signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). The discrimination of temperature and axial strain is realized based on the dispersion effects of high-order-mode fiber (HOMF) by forming a single mode fiber-high-order-mode fiber-single mode fiber (SMF-HOMF-SMF) structure based in-line Mach-Zehnder interferometer. Unlike some kinds of in-line MZIs such as tapered and core–offset structures whose cladding modes are excited with different types under changing temperature and strain circumstances, the HOMF is capable of supporting three stable core modes, which guarantees a reliable and repeatable measurements within a large temperature or strain range. A new method based on the fast Fourier transform (FFT) is employed to analyze the mode couplings and their chromatic dispersion and intermodal dispersion properties in HOMF. The strong dispersion effects lead to a multi-peak feature in the spatial frequency spectrum. It is found that peaks that denote the waveform periods at positions that are beyond the critical wavelength possess highly sensitive and distinct phase responses to external disturbances, which provides the possibility to realize the discrimination measurements with high sensitivities and smaller errors by selecting appropriate peaks. The phase demodulation scheme is applied to quantify the temperature and strain changes in terms of phase shifts. Appropriate peak selections according to the practical needs would provide an easy access for applications where more than two parameters are required to be discriminated.