High-precision FBG demodulation using amplitude ratio curve with sharp peak

Abstract For the fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensor based on the reflection peak position searching demodulation algorithms, a key problem is that the demodulation precision of measurement signal is seriously limited by the full width half maximum (FWHM) of the FBG reflection spectrum. In this paper, in order to overcome this problem and enhance the measurement precision, we proposed a high-precision demodulation method based on amplitude ratio curve to instead of the FBG reflection spectrum, which can increase the sensing precision significantly. In this method, the Bragg wavelength of FBG is modulated periodically with a sinusoidal function to obtain a series of reflection spectra. Then at each wavelength the amplitude ratio between second harmonic frequency component and fundamental frequency component is calculated to create the amplitude ratio curve. Here, we present a comprehensive theoretical analysis and experimental demonstration to verify the advantages of this method. Comparing with the demodulation method based on the FBG reflection spectrum, the average maximum measure error (MME) of Bragg wavelength is reduced from ±1.54 pm to ±0.15 pm, which improved by 10.3 times. In addition, the influence of the modulation amplitude and sampling frequency on demodulation accuracy are also studied in this paper.