An ultrasonic sensor composed of a fiber Bragg grating with an air bubble for underwater object detection

Abstract We present and experimentally demonstrate a novel optical fiber ultrasonic sensor composed of a fiber Bragg grating (FBG) with an air bubble for underwater object detection. The air bubble is formed by splicing etched FBG and single mode fiber (SMF) with taper-shaped holes. And because of the corrosive action, the diameters of FBG and SMF reduces from 125 μm to dozens of micrometers, which will be conducive to improving the sensor's performances. The experiment results indicate that the sensor has high voltage responses of 6.3 V and 7.1 V to the continuous and pulse ultrasonic wave (UW) at 1 MHz and could be used for underwater objects imaging with high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Subsequently, the environmental temperature will not influence ultrasonic measurements using the sensor on account of the low temperature sensitivity of 19.5 pm/°C.