Wide bandwidth dual-frequency ultrasound measurements based on fiber laser sensing technology

A dual-frequency ultrasound measurement system based on a distributed Bragg reflector (DBR) fiber laser sensor in a liquid medium was presented. To compare the dual-frequency measurement performance of a DBR fiber laser acoustic sensor with that of a piezoelectric (PZT) ultrasound sensor, two experiments were performed. First, we fixed the driving frequencies of two ultrasound signals at 3 and 5 MHz, and decreased the driving voltage from 15 to 3 V. The outputs of the DBR acoustic sensor show flat-balanced response to dual-frequencies, compared with the PZT acoustic sensor whose response to one of the dual-frequency signals (5 MHz in this paper) has been covered by noise at low acoustic pressure. Then we increased the acoustic pressure by fixing the driving voltage at 20 V, and changed the frequency spacing between the two ultrasound signals. By analyzing the frequency response, sensitivity, signal-to-noise ratio, and noise equivalent pressure of two acoustic sensors under different frequencies, we found that the response of the DBR sensor to wideband dual-frequency is stable, while the response of the PZT sensor deteriorates sharply with increasing frequency spacing. The results demonstrate that the DBR fiber laser sensor performs better for wide bandwidth dual-frequency ultrasound measurements. (C) 2016 Optical Society of America