We report a fiber Bragg grating(FBG)vibration transducer based on an equal strength cantilever with enhanced sensitivity design.The sensitivity of the transducer is improved by a buffer layer of polyimide which increases the effective distance between the FBG and the neutral axis of the cantilever.The thickness of the polyimide layer is further optimized by finite element analysis(FEA).Vibration test results demonstrate that the sensitivity is enhanced by about 3.34 times than the conventional design,from the original 10.2 pm/g to 44.3 pm/g,which is consistent with the FEA.It is also shown experimentally that the sensitivity enhancement does not degrade the fundamental vibration characteristics of the cantilever,especially the resonant frequency.
The digital coherent detection technique has been investigated without any frequency-scanning device in the Brillouin optical time domain reflectometry(BOTDR), where the simplex pulse codes are applied in the sensing system. The time domain signal of every code sequence is collected by the data acquisition card(DAQ). A shift-averaging technique is applied in the frequency domain for the reason that the local oscillator(LO) in the coherent detection is fix-frequency deviated from the primary source. With the 31-bit simplex code, the signal-to-noise ratio(SNR) has 3.5-dB enhancement with the same single pulse traces, accordant with the theoretical analysis. The frequency fluctuation for simplex codes is 14.01 MHz less than that for a single pulse as to 4-m spatial resolution. The results are believed to be beneficial for the BOTDR performance improvement.
The effects of optical sources with different laser linewidths on Brillouin optical time domain reflectometry (BOTDR) are investigated numerically and experimentally. Simulation results show that the spectral linewidth of spontaneous Brillouin scattering remains almost constant when the laser linewidth is less than 1 MHz at the same pulse width; otherwise, it increases sharply. A comparison between a fiber laser (FL) with 4-kHz linewidth at 3 dB and a distributed feedback (DFB) laser with 3-MHz linewidth is made experimentally. When a constant laser power is launched into the sensing fiber, the fitting linewidths of the beat signals (backscattered Brillouin light and local oscillator (LO)) is about 5 MHz wider for the DFB laser than for the FL and the intensity of the beat signal is about a half. Furthermore, the frequency fluctuation in the long sensing fiber is lower for the FL source, yielding about 2 MHz less than that of the DFB laser, indicating higher temperature/strain resolution. The experimental results are in good agreement with the numerical simulations.
