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IEEE PHOTONICS TECHNOLOGY LETTERS, VOL. 22, NO. 19, OCTOBER 1, 2010

100-km Long Distance Fiber Bragg Grating Sensor System Based on Erbium-Doped Fiber and Raman Amplication
Junhao Hu, Student Member, IEEE, Zhihao Chen, Senior Member, IEEE, Xiufeng Yang, Junhong Ng, and Changyuan Yu, Member, IEEE
laser source at around 1480 nm is used. In addition, the measurement length is only 50 km for their system [4], [5]. Fu et al. demonstrated a 75-km long distance FBG sensor system. However, an amplied stimulated emission (ASE) is needed every 25 km which makes the system more complicated and less controllable in practical applications [6]. Rao et al. proposed a 100-km long-distance FBG sensor system based on a tunable ber ring laser conguration [7] and a 300-km FBG sensor system using hybrid EDF and Raman amplication [8]. But the system needs three pump laser sources at different wavelengths including a 2-W Raman laser source at 1480 nm and a ber ring laser conguration [7], and an additional Raman pump is needed at the distal end [8], which makes the setup quite complicated. In summary, because of the measurement length limitation by the loss and attenuation along the ber, increasing the pump power seems to be the most effective method to get a longer distance ber sensor system. However, lasing effects were induced when the pump power was increased to a threshold, which is the main reason why it is hard to get longer distance FBG sensor system. To achieve longer distance measurement, as shown in [4][8], complicated setups with a lot of components are used to reduce the lasing effect. In practical usage, however, simple and easily launched long distance sensor systems are desired. In this letter, a novel 100-km FBG sensor system is proposed and demonstrated. To the best of our knowledge, it is the simplest setup with the least devices in the long distance FBG sensor system. This 100-km long distance FBG sensor system was achieved by using only a Raman laser as pump at 1395 nm and two segments of EDF located at 50 and 75 km, respectively. In this long distance FBG sensor system, no additional devices are needed along the ber, except two segments of EDF which are spliced between the single-mode bers (SMF) at different locations, as shown in Fig. 1. In addition, because the pump power of the EDF at 1480 nm was generated along the ber by the rst-order stimulated Raman scattering (SRS), the pump power can be increased to a high level without lasing effect, which made the long distance measurement possible. II. WORKING PRINCIPLE In order to illustrate the working principle of this 100-km ber Bragg grating sensor system, the experimental setup in Fig. 2 was used to measure the transmitted spectrum, which is shown in Fig. 3. It was directly measured after the 5.4-m EDF (without FBG and with only one segment of EDF) at 50 km

AbstractA simple 100-km long distance ber Bragg grating sensor system was proposed and demonstrated. It can achieve 100-km measurement length with reected Bragg wavelength spectrum of 30 dB signal noise ratio by using only one Raman pump laser source with 1 W power at 1395 nm and two segments of erbium-doped ber at the locations of 50 and 75 km separately. Index TermsErbium-doped ber (EDF), ber Bragg grating (FBG), long distance sensor, Raman scattering.

I. INTRODUCTION

IBER Bragg grating (FBG) ber sensors are very attractive in many applications due to their high versatile advantages such as high sensitivity, electro-magnetic immunity, compactness, high resolution, and high optical signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) against the noise [1]. Due to the noise and loss induced by the Rayleigh scattering and attenuation along the ber respectively, the maximum transmission distance with a broadband light source is limited up to 25 km [2]. Because of that, the measurement distance of FBG ber sensor system comes out to be a practical issue. A lot of work has been done to increase the measuring distance of the ber sensor. For example, Peng et al. proposed an approach by using the linear cavity Raman laser conguration based on an FBG and a ber loop mirror. However, the long distance ber acted as the role of laser cavity in their setup, which would bring out the thermal stability issue along the ber [3]. Lee et al. proposed a Raman amplier-based long-distance sensing system using a combined sensing probe of an erbium-doped ber (EDF) and an FBG, but more than one
Manuscript received February 05, 2010; revised July 14, 2010; accepted July 17, 2010. Date of publication August 03, 2010; date of current version September 06, 2010. J. Hu is with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, National University of Singapore, 117576, Singapore (e-mail: junhaohu@nus.edu.sg). Z. Chen and J. Ng are with the A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R), 138632, Singapore (e-mail: zchen@i2r.a-star.edu.sg; ngjh@i2r.a-star.edu.sg). X. Yang was with the A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R), Singapore. She is now with the School of Computer and Communication Engineering, Tianjin University of Technology, Tianjin Key Laboratory of Film Electronic and Communication Devices, Tianjin 300384, China (e-mail: yangxfbee@163. com). C. Yu is with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, National University of Singapore, 117576, Singapore. He is also with the A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R), 138632, Singapore (e-mail: eleyc@nus.edu. sg). Color versions of one or more of the gures in this letter are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. Digital Object Identier 10.1109/LPT.2010.2062495

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of EDF and different location of EDF. It can be used to achieve the 100-km long distance FBG sensor system. III. EXPERIMENTAL SETUP Fig. 1 shows the experimental setup for our proposed 100-km long distance FBG sensor system. The Raman laser source at 1395 nm with a 1.5-nm line width has up to 1.5 w CW output power. This pump laser source working at around 1 W was launched into the SMF by using a 1395/1550 nm wavelength division multiplexer coupler. Two segments of 5.4-mm EDF were spliced at the locations of 50 and 75 km among the SMF, respectively. The FBG (0.2-nm spectral bandwidth), whose Bragg wavelength is in the range of the ASE generated by the EDF, was placed at the end of the ber sensor system. In order to get high SNR of the reected spectrum of FBG, the FBG, used in the experiment, is good to have more than 90% of reectivity. An optical spectrum analyzer (OSA) with a resolution of 0.01 nm was used to measure the reected spectrum of the system, from which the reected Bragg wavelength of the FBG can be obtained. Because of the SRS, the pump power at 1395 nm was separated into three main parts by using the SMF as the Raman gain medium after passing the rst 50 km SMF. These three parts were the residual pump power at 1395 nm, the transmitted power at 1480 nm, and the reected power at 1480 nm. After passing the rst segment of EDF located at 50 km, some power at 1480 nm was transferred by the EDF to generate ASE, which has the spectrum range the FBG is located in. The generated ASE also had two parts, one in the forward direction and the other in the backward direction. The transmitted spectrum after the rst EDF had three parts, as shown in Fig. 3. Then, these three parts transmit along another 25 km SMF. The residual pump power at 1395 nm was also separated into three parts as explained above. The power at 1480 nm was reduced by the attenuation and loss and increased by the SRS at the same time. The power of the ASE was reduced by the attenuation and loss in this 25 km. In order to transmit this ASE to further distance, another segment of EDF at 75 km was used to further transfer the power at 1480 nm to ASE. After another 25 km, an FBG was placed at the end of the ber sensor system. Because the power at around 1480 nm was no longer high enough to generate additional ASE at the 100 km point, the third segment of EDF was not needed to be inserted before the FBG. The FBG only reected the power at the Bragg wavelength, which went back through another 100 km to the OSA. Because of the reected power at 1480 nm and the reected ASE, the power of the Bragg wavelength can be amplied by them at the backward transmission. As shown in Fig. 4, the reected spectrum contained three parts, the reected power at 1480 nm, the reected ASE, and the Bragg wavelength in the range of ASE. IV. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS By placing the FBG in the environment with different temperatures, the Bragg wavelength of the FBG at different temperature can be obtained. To illustrate the performance of this 100-km long distance FBG sensor system, four spectra at temperature 23.2 C, 38.4 C, 52.8 C, and 68.2 C were recorded

Fig. 1. Experiment setup.

Fig. 2. Experimental setup to illustrate working principle.

Fig. 3. Transmitted spectrum of 50-km system as shown in Fig. 2.

when the pump power was increased to around 1 W. The rst peak around 1395 nm is the residual pump laser, which still has very high pump power. The second peak around 1480 nm comes from the rst-order SRS which has nearly the same peak power as the Raman pump. The third area around 15301570 nm is obviously the ASE generated by the EDF, because the rst-order SRS around 1480 nm can act as the pump of the EDF. Since the Bragg wavelength is in the range of the ASE, it means that this system does not need additional ASE to act as a broadband laser source to get an FBG sensor system. After 50-km transmission, the residual pump laser around 1395 nm still can generate the power around 1480 nm. However, the desired light was the ASE generated by it. So another segment of 5.4-m EDF was placed at the location of 75 km in the 100-km FBG sensor system to generate ASE at the location of 75 km and make the generated ASE transmit longer to get long measurement length. It means that the ASE generated by the laser should have the enough power to arrive at the location of FBG and make sure the reected spectrum of the FBG have the enough power to be detected. The setup in Fig. 1 was the optimal scheme chosen from the setups with different lengths

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IEEE PHOTONICS TECHNOLOGY LETTERS, VOL. 22, NO. 19, OCTOBER 1, 2010

Fig. 4. Reected spectrum of 100-km FBG sensor system.

Fig. 6. FBG Bragg wavelengths as function of applied temperatures.

V. CONCLUSION We have demonstrated a novel rst-order Raman amplier and EDF-based 100-km long distance FBG ber sensing system with a temperature resolution of 0.9 C and an accuracy of 1 C, and more than 30 dB SNR. The proposed sensing system is only composed of a laser source at 1395 nm, two segments of EDF, and the conventionalSMF with the length of 100 km. An FBG sensor system with even longer measurement distance with the similar scheme is under investigation in our lab. REFERENCES
[1] A. D. Kersey, M. A. Davis, H. J. Partrick, M. Leblance, K. P. Koo, C. G. Askins, M. A. Putnam, and E. J. Friebele, Fiber grating sensors, J. Lightw. Technol., vol. 15, no. 8, pp. 14421463, Aug. 1997. [2] Y. Nakajima, Y. Shindo, and T. Yoshikawa, Novel concept as longdistance transmission FBG sensor system using distributed Raman amplication, in Proc. 16th Int. Conf. Optical Fiber Sensors, Nara, Japan, Oct. 2003, pp. 14. [3] P.-C. Peng, H.-Y. Tseng, and S. Chi, Long-distance FBG sensor system using a linear-cavity ber Raman laser scheme, IEEE Photon. Technol. Lett., vol. 16, no. 4, pp. 575577, Apr. 2004. [4] J. H. Lee et al., Raman amplier-based long-distance remote, strain and temperature sensing system using an erbium-doped ber and a ber Bragg grating, Opt. Expr., vol. 12, no. 15, pp. 35153520, 2004. [5] Han, Young-Geun, Tran, T. Van Anh, Lee, J. H. Lee, and S. Bae, Long-distance remote simultaneous measurement of strain and temperature based on a Raman ber laser with a single FBG embedded in a quartz plate, Proc. SPIEInt. Soc. Opt. Eng., vol. 6351 II, 2006. [6] H. Y. Fu, H. L. Liu, W. H. Chung, and H. Y. Tam, A novel ber Bragg grating sensor conguration for long-distance quasi distributed measurement, IEEE Sensors J., vol. 8, no. 9, Sep. 2008. [7] Y.-J. Rao, Z.-L. Ran, and X.-D. Luo, An ultra-long-distance FBG sensor system based on a tunable ber ring laser conguration, in Proc. Optical Fiber Communication Conf. Expo. Nat. Fiber Optic Engineers Conf. OFCNFOEC, 2007, pp. 13. [8] Y.-J. Rao, S. Feng, Q. Jiang, and Z.-L. Ran, Ultra-long distance (300 km) ber Bragg grating sensor system using hybrid EDF and Raman amplication, Proc. SPIE, vol. 7503, p. 75031Q, 2009.

Fig. 5. Reected spectra of FBG Bragg wavelength of 100-km long distance FBG sensory system at four different temperatures.

in Fig. 5. It was found that the Bragg wavelength of the FBG was shifting as the increase of the temperature. And it was clearly evident that high quality sensing signals with 30 dB SNR were obtained by this 100-km sensor system. Fig. 6 shows the Bragg wavelength as a function of the applied temperature in the range from 20 C to 85 C. It was found that a good linearity for temperature measurement had been achieved, and the temperature sensitivity is 11.2 pm/ C and temperature resolution is 0.89 C. Our experiment has shown that our system has C. The typical temperagood repeatability. The accuracy is ture measurement range is up to 120 C. Furthermore, the maximum temperature can be 300 C if the polyimide ber is used.