Spectrally scanned, repetitively pulsed erbium-doped fiber laser for spectral and temporal multiplexing of fiber Bragg grating sensors.
An erbium-doped fiber laser that emits a series of spectrally scanned pulses is used to monitor an array of fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensors. The cavity for this Fabry-Perot laser is formed by two spectrally selective reflectors: a rotating mirror-grating combination for scanning the reflectance peak wavelength and a fiber Fabry-Perot interferometer (FFPI) with a periodic reflectance spectrum. During a scan of the rotating mirror, the laser produces a set of Q-switched pulses over the 1522-1568-nm spectral range at each of the FFPI reflectance peak wavelengths. This laser is used to simultaneously demonstrate wavelength-division multiplexing of FBGs with reflectance peaks in different spectral regimes and time-division multiplexing of FBGs with overlapping spectra. The spectral location of the FBG peaks was determined to an accuracy of 1.4 pm.