A Closed-Loop Interrogation Technique for Multi-Point Temperature Measurement Using Fiber Bragg Gratings

In this paper a closed-loop interrogation technique for multi-point temperature measurement using fiber Bragg gratings (FBG) is presented. The technique uses a broadband light source and n tunable FBGs to interrogate an array of n FBGs sensors placed along the optical fiber. Each center wavelength of the tunable FBGs is matched with the center wavelength of one FBG sensor placed in the array. The light source directly illuminates the sensor array, so that all the light reflected from the FBGs enters in the optical circuit through an optical circulator and the reflected spectrum of each sensing FBG illuminates a matched tunable FBG. Because the current generated by the photodiode is proportional to the convolution between the two FBGs profiles (the sensor FBG and the tunable FBG), by controlling the value of the convolution at a fixed value, the center wavelengths of the two FBGs are kept spaced by a constant value. Therefore, the temperature of the FBG sensor can be associated with the temperature of the tunable FBG. A two channel prototype was constructed to validate the technique and a very high resolution of ±0.001 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">°</sup> C was obtained.