A quasi-distributed temperature sensor interrogated by a wavelength-sensitive optical time-domain reflectometer

In this note, we present a quasi-distributed temperature monitoring system based on the concatenation of identical low-reflective fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs) and interrogated by means of an optical time-domain reflectometer (OTDR). An original wavelength-sensitive system placed before the OTDR detector is used to analyze the reflected signal. This system allows the height of the FBG reflection peaks in the OTDR trace to depend on their resonance wavelength, and therefore to the local temperature. In addition, a simple but original reference method is proposed. The configuration of the whole interrogating device is kept very basic, as a standard OTDR and some passive components are used. The cost of the overall system is therefore very limited. In this note, the wavelength-sensitive system is studied in details, as well as the reference method. Experimental results are reported.