We developed a distributed refractive index (RI) sensor based on high performance optical frequency-domain reflectometry (OFDR) by simply bending a piece of standard single mode fiber (SMF) in a U shape. In the U-bent region, cladding modes are excited, which can reach to the boundary of the SMF to sense external RI variation. The cladding modes are then coupled back to the core mode and interfere with the fundamental mode. Thus, the fundamental mode can carry the varied RI information, and distributed index sensing is achieved by measuring the wavelength shifts of the local Rayleigh backscattered spectra. Thanks to the high signal SNR of OFDR, that compensating the bending induced loss, the proposed sensor can be bent in a small bending radius so that a high sensitivity of RI could be achieved. In the experiment, index sensitivity of 39.08 nm/RIU is achieved by imposing a bending radius of 4 mm, when the RI ranges from 1.3330 to 1.3773. Additionally, the proposed sensor maintains buffer coating intact, which boosts its practicability and application flexibility.
We numerically calculate and experimentally investigate the characterization of phase-shifted Brillouin dynamic gratings
(PS-BDGs) in a polarization maintaining fiber (PMF). A phase-shifted point is induced into the middle of a conventional
BDG through phase-modulating one of the two pump pulse, generating a PS-BDG thanks to the stimulated Brillouin
scattering (SBS). When the frequency difference between a high frequency pump1 pulse with 1ns and π-1ns and a low
frequency pump2 pulse with 100ps is equal to the Brillouin frequency shift of the PMF, a transient PS-BDG with a 3dBbandwidth
of 354MHz of the notch spectrum is simulated based on the coupled-wave equations of BDG. By increasing
the repetition rate up to 250MHz, an enhanced PS-BDG with a deep notch depth is obtained since the residual acoustic
wave of the former SBS process is enhanced by the optical waves of the latter SBS process. Then a proof-of-concept
experiment is built to verify the transient PS-BDG and the results show that the notch feature is consistent with the
simulation results and the notch frequency of the PS-BDG can be changed by tuning the phase shift Δϕ . The proposed
PS-BDGs have important potential applications in optical fiber sensing, microwave photonics, all-optical signal
processing and RoF (radio-over-fiber) networks.
We demonstrate an up to 1200°C high-temperature distributed Brillouin sensing based on a pure-silica photonics crystal
fiber. A Brillouin frequency shift (BFS) hopping is observed between 800°C-900°C for the first annealing process and
after that the BFS exhibits the stability and repeatability with a measurement accuracy as high as ±2 °C . The BFS
dependence on temperature in the range of room temperature to 1200°C agrees well with an exponential function instead
of a linear function, which is mainly attributed by the change of the acoustic velocity in a silica fiber.
We propose a bend-insensitive distributed Brillouin optical fiber sensing by using a singlemode-multimode-singlemode optical fiber structure for the first time to the best of our knowledge. The sensing fiber is a graded-index multimode fiber (GI-MMF) sandwiched by two standard single-mode fibers (SMFs) with centrally alignment splicing at the interface between GI-MMF and SMF to excite the fundamental mode only in GI-MMF. The sensing system can resist a minimal bend radius of 1.25mm while maintaining the measurement performance, with which the measured coefficient of strain is 421.6MHz/%. We also demonstrate that the higher-order modes exciting in GI-MMF can be easily influenced by bending, so that the fundamental mode exciting is essential for bend-insensitive distributed sensing.
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