Tunable erbium-doped fiber ring laser with signal-averaging function for fiber-optic sensing applications

Abstract

This work proposes a novel erbium-doped fiber ring laser as a sensing control center (CC) for long-haul fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensor systems. The tunable erbium-doped fiber laser with signal averaging functionality not only provides intense and stable laser light, but also suppresses the effect of noise on the system performance. A sample 30/60 km FBG sensor array is connected to the fiber ring laser to demonstrate experimentally the feasibility and effectiveness of the laser as a CC. The experimental results indicate that the signal averaging operation inside the proposed setup increases the system signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).