Dual fiber Bragg gratings configuration based fiber acoustic sensor for low frequency signal detection

We propose and fabricate a new type fiber acoustic sensor based on dual fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs) configuration. The acoustic sensor head is constructed by putting the sensing cells enclosed in an aluminum cylinder space built by two C-band FBGs and a titanium diaphragm of 50 um thickness. One end of each FBG is longitudinally adhered to the diaphragm by UV glue. Both of the two FBGs are employed for reflecting light. The dual FBGs play roles not only as signal transmission system but also as sensing component, and they demodulate each other's optical signal mutually during the measurement. Both of the two FBGs are pre- strained and the output optical power experiences fluctuation in a linear relationship along with a variation of axial strain and surrounding acoustic interference. So a precise approach to measure the frequency and sound pressure of the acoustic disturbance is achieved. Experiments are performed and results show that a relatively flat frequency response in a range from 200 Hz to 1 kHz with the average signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) above 21 dB is obtained. The maximum sound pressure sensitivity of 11.35mV/Pa is achieved with the R-squared value of 0.99131 when the sound pressure in the range of 87.7-106.6dB. It has potential applications in low frequency signal detection. Owing to its direct self-demodulation method, the sensing system reveals the advantages of easy to demodulate, good temperature stability and measurement reliability. Besides, performance of the proposed sensor could be improved by optimizing the parameters of the sensor, especially the diaphragm.