JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 30, NO.

8, APRIL 15, 2012

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150-km Long Distance FBG Temperature and Vibration Sensor System Based on Stimulated Raman Amplication
Junhao Hu, Student Member, IEEE, Zhihao Chen, Senior Member, IEEE, and Changyuan Yu, Member, IEEE
(Invited Paper)

AbstractA 150-km long distance ber Bragg Grating (FBG) temperature and vibration sensor system was proposed and demonstrated by using the stimulated Raman amplication. It can achieve 150-km measurement range by using a low power 1480-nm laser as the Stokes of the pump laser at 1395 nm in the progress of stimulated Raman amplication. And the whole system only consist one Raman pump laser source with 1-W power at 1395 nm, a low-power 1480-nm laser and two segments of erbium doped ber (EDF) at the location of 50 km and 75 km separately. Index TermsLong distance sensor, FBG sensor, stimulated Raman scattering, temperature and vibration sensor.

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 of a broadband light is limited to 25 km [2], so we cannot just propagate a broadband light over single-mode ber (SMF) to get a long distance ber sensor based on the refection of ber Bragg grating (FBG) at the far end. For long distance sensor system based on FBG, high-power pump light is desired to generate amplied spontaneous emission (ASE) through Erbium doped ber (EDF) located at a long distance away. However, the transmission SMF will become a laser cavity when the pump power is increased to a certain level. In order to solve these problems, a few techniques have been proposed. P.C. Peng et al. proposed

Manuscript received June 30, 2011; revised September 06, 2011; accepted October 04, 2011. Date of publication October 18, 2011; date of current version March 30, 2012. J. Hu is with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, National University of Singapore, 117576 Singapore. Z. Chen is with A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R), 138632 Singapore. C. Yu is with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, National University of Singapore, 117576, Singapore and also with A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R), 138632 Singapore (e-mail: eleyc@nus.edu.sg). Digital Object Identier 10.1109/JLT.2011.2172573

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 the thermal instability issue along the ber [3]. J.H. Lee et al. proposed a Raman amplier-based long-distance sensing system using a combined sensing probe of an erbium-doped ber and an FBG, but more than one laser source at around 1480 nm are used. In addition, the measurement length is only 50 km for their system [4], [5]. H. Y. 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 for practical applications [6]. Y.J. 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 make 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 longer distance ber sensor system. However, lasing effects are induced when the pump power is 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 setup with a lot of components are used to reduce the lasing effect. In practical usage, however, simple long distance sensor systems are desired. A 100-km sensor system has been demonstrated by using a single Raman laser at 1395 nm in our previous system [9]. In this paper, we propose a new improved system. A measurement distance up to 150 km is demonstrated by using two lasers at 1395 nm and 1480 nm at the transmitter. And multi-point FBG temperature and vibration sensor system is also demonstrated in this setup. Such a signicant improvement is achieved only by adding a low-power 1480-nm laser. However, the operation principle of this long distance FBG sensor system is changed by adding this 1480-nm laser. In this setup, the power of 1480 nm is not generated by the pump laser at 1395 nm, but is added directly into the system and amplied along the SMF by the pump laser at 1395 nm through stimulated Raman scattering (SRS).

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By adding this change, the amplied power by SRS concentrates on the wavelength at 1480 nm. Then the 1480-nm laser can transmit over longer distance to EDF. The ASE will have higher power to act as the broadband light source for the FBG sensor. And multi-point long distance temperature and vibration FBG sensor system is demonstrated in this paper. 11000 Hz vibration measurement range is achieved in this setup. II. THEORY AND PRINCIPLE A. Spontaneous versus Stimulated Raman Scattering The Raman scattering effect is the inelastic scattering of a photon with an optical phonon, which originates from a nite response time of the third order nonlinear polarization [10] of the material. When a monochromatic light beam propagates in an optical ber, spontaneous Raman scattering occurs. It transfers some of the photons to new frequencies. The scattered photons may lose energy (Stokes shift) or gain energy (anti-Stokes shift). If the pump beam is linearly polarized, the polarization of scattered photon may be the same (parallel scattering) or orthogonal (perpendicular scattering). If photons at other frequencies are already present then the probability of scattering to those frequencies is enhanced. This process is known as stimulated Raman scattering. In stimulated Raman scattering, a coincident photon at the downshifted frequency will receive a gain. This feature of Raman scattering is exploited in Raman ampliers for signal amplication. In this paper, it will be used to amplify the power of 1480-nm laser through the propagation, and then pump the EDF. In detail, if a light of frequency is illuminated into the ber and its intensity is greater than a certain threshold, a frequency of is generated which equals minus the frequency of Raman-active vibration. This is called Raman process annihilating a photon from a radiation mode and generating a photon at another mode . Their energy difference can be illustrated in this equation, , where is the state with energy is the state with energy . The Raman scattering rate has a factor depending on matrix elements between various states in the medium. If the probabilities of being in the th state is , the average net rate of change of photon number in the scattered mode arising from a given matter transition and incident mode , is of the form [11]: (1) Where, the subscript and symbolizes those states for which and are the number of photons present in the incident and scattered modes. If the effects of linear optical absorption of the pump and Stokes waves is considered, the differential equation for a forward traveling wave at the stokes frequency is [12]: (2) where the subscript and refers to the pump and Stokes component; is the pump power at any point, is the

Fig. 1. Experimental setup of spontaneous Raman scattering.

Fig. 2. Transmitted spectrum of experiment setup in Fig. 1. The power of 1395-nm laser is 27 dBm.

Stokes power at any point. The gain constant depends upon the Raman scattering cross section. The single mode bers have the effective cross-sectional area A and length L with an attenuation constant . From the (1) and (2), it is known that it will have a gain or laser action when the terms on the right-hand side of (1) are positive, or the gain is larger than the attenuation along the ber in (2). In other words, the Stokes frequency will be amplied through the stimulated Raman scattering. In order to study the efciency of Raman scattering, different experiments are carried out based on the setups shown in Figs. 1 and 3. As the setup shown in Fig. 1, only one pump laser at 1395 nm, whose power is set to be 27 dBm, is launched into a 50-km single mode ber. Because there is no Stokes wavelength, only spontaneous Raman scattering happens within the wavelength range as shown in Fig. 2. However, the transmitted spectrum will changed a lot when a 1480-nm laser is added before the 1395-nm laser by using a 1480/1550-nm coupler, as shown in Fig. 3. Although the power of 1480-nm laser is relatively small, which is only 3.3 mW, it still makes the Stokes photon number large enough to generate the stimulated Raman scattering. As the transmitted spectrum shown in Fig. 4, the power around 1480 nm is much more focus on one single wavelength, which is the laser wavelength we add into the system. The power transfer rate from 1395 nm to 1480 nm has been increased a lot by inserting a laser with wavelength around 1480 nm. As what we are going to introduce in the next section, long distance FBG sensor is what we wanted. Then the power of ASE is really desired, which is generated by pumping EDF with laser around 1480 nm. It means increasing the power of 1480 nm is very important to increase the measurement distance. That is

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Fig. 3. Experiment setup of stimulated Raman scattering.

Fig. 6. Transmitted spectrum of the setup in Fig. 5.

Fig. 4. Transmitted spectrum of experiment setup in Fig. 3. The power of 1395-nm is 27 dBm. The power of 1480-nm laser is 3.3 mW.

Fig. 7. Experimental setup of the working principle for 150-km FBG sensor system.

Fig. 5. Experiment setup to illustrate the working principle of the 100 km long distance FBG sensor system.

why we are going to introduce the new scheme as shown in Fig. 3. B. Principle of Long Distance Fiber Bragg Grating Sensor In order to get a long distance FBG sensor system, the power of ASE should be obtained, which will act as the broadband light source of the FBG. Because of the high attenuation in the long distance ber, broadband light source cannot be propagated directly into the system. A 1480-nm laser is normally used to pump the EDF to generate the ASE. And this 1480-nm laser should have relatively high power and also make sure no lasing effect will happen when pumping the EDF. As the extension of Fig. 1, a method shown in Fig. 5 with one pump laser at 1395 nm has been proposed in 2010 [9]. In this setup, only one Raman pump laser at 1395 nm is used to generate the broadband light source for the FBGs. In this paper, however, a new scheme based on the setup of Fig. 3, is proposed in Fig. 7. In order to show improvement between these two, the transmitted spectra are compared in Figs. 6 and 8. As shown in Figs. 5 and 7, a 5-meter EDF (without FBG and with only one segment of EDF) is inserted at 50 km to measure the transmitted spectra. The only difference is that, a 1480 nm laser is added as shown in Fig. 7. The pump powers of 1395-nm lasers are all set as 1 W, and the power of 1480 nm

Fig. 8. Transmitted spectrum of the setup in Fig. 7.

is 3.3 mW in Fig. 6. As the transmitted spectra shown in Fig. 6, the rst peak around 1395 nm is the residual pump laser. Because the pump power of 1395-nm laser is set as 1 W, high power around 1480 nm is generated. But the generation progress is different from the setup in Fig. 7. As shown in Fig. 2, the spectrum around 1480 nm is generated by spontaneous Raman scattering when the pump power is 27 dBm. When the power of 1395-nm laser is further increased, the wavelength generated by spontaneous Raman scattering will act as the Stokes laser. Then power around 1480 nm will be amplied, as the second peak shown in Fig. 6. The third area around 15301570 nm is obviously the ASE generated by the EDF, because the second peak around 1480 nm can act as the pump of the EDF. Since the Bragg wavelength of FBG, what we are going to insert in the

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Fig. 9. 150-km long distance multi-point FBG sensor system.

ber, 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. In this long distance FBG sensor system, because the desired light is the ASE generated by 1480 nm laser, the higher power transfer efciency from 1395 nm to 1480 nm is consequently desired. However, there is no Stokes signal around 1480 nm in the setup in Fig. 5, then as shown in the transmitted spectra, we can nd that the generated power around 1480 nm in Fig. 6 is smaller than the one in Fig. 8 after transmitting 75 km. In other words, the power usage of setup in Fig. 5 does not have high efciency. As we can see, the 1395-nm laser still has relatively high power after passing 75 km. And this power will not be used in the following SMF for its relatively low power. However, after adding a low power 1480-nm laser as the Stokes light at the beginning, the power transfer efciency in Fig. 7 is much higher, as the transmitted spectrum shown in Fig. 8. And the desired peak power of ASE in Fig. 8 is about 5 dB larger than the peak power of ASE in Fig. 6. In conclusion, the power transfer efciency is much higher when a low power 1480-nm laser is added in the system. In other words, the setup shown in Fig. 7 can be used for longer measurement distance FBG sensor. The 150-km long distance FBG sensor system based on Fig. 7 will be introduced in the next section. III. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS A. Multi-Point Long Distance FBG Sensor System The 150-km long distance multi-point FBG sensor system is shown in Fig. 8. The Raman laser source at 1395 nm with a 1.5-nm line width has up to 1.5-w CW output power. By using a 1395/1550-nm wavelength division multiplexer coupler, the 1395-nm pump laser source at around 1 W is launched into the 150-km SMF. And a 1480-nm laser is added into the system by using a 1480/1550-nm coupler before the 1395/1550-nm coupler. Two segments of 5-m EDF (EDFC-980-HP from Nufern Company) are spliced at the location of 50 km and 75 km among the SMF, respectively. The FBG, with the Bragg wavelength in the range of the ASE, is placed along the system. Three FBGs are inserted to measure the temperatures or vibrations. These 3 FBGs are FBG1, FBG2 and FBG3 have the central wavelengths of 1561 nm, 1558 nm and 1554 nm, respectively. And there are located at 150 km, 125 km, and 100 km, respectively. In order to get high SNR of the reected spectrum, the FBGs used in the experiment have more than 90% of reectivity. In the detection part, an optical spectrum analyzer (OSA) is used to monitor the

wavelength change of the FBGs. A tunable optical lter with 0.5-nm bandwidth is used to lter reected Bragg wavelength of the FBG for the vibration demodulation. In order to illustrate the working principle, the power transfer along the ber is explained in details as follows. Because of the stimulated Raman scattering, 1480 nm light is amplied, which can act as the pump of EDF to generate ASE after passing the rst segment of EDF located at 50 km as shown in Fig. 8. The generated ASE has two parts, one in the forward direction and the other in the backward direction. Another segment of 5-m EDF is used at the location of 75 km to further transfer the residual power at 1480 nm to the ASE. These are all done to make sure the ASE can transmit longer distance. The reected spectrum of the sensor system has two main parts, one is the reected spectrum at 1480 nm and the other is the reected ASE with Bragg wavelength spectrum. The reected spectrum at 1480 nm is the backward effect by the stimulated Raman scattering. In order to further use the power around 1480 nm, which still have high power after transmitting 75 km as shown in Fig. 8, another segment of 5 meter EDF is placed at the location of 75 km to generate ASE 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. 9 is the optimal scheme chosen from the setups with different lengths of EDF and different location of EDF. In principle, more FBGs, which have the different wavelength with these 3 FBGs, can be added along the system to achieve the real long distance sensor system. As shown in Fig. 10, the reected spectrum of the system shows the Bragg wavelengths of FBG1, FBG2 and FBG3. And we can also found that the signal noise ratio (SNR) of FBG3 at 100 km is more than 35 dB. The SNR of FBG1 and FBG2 are relatively smaller. But there are also good to be used as sensors. B. Temperature Sensor As shown in Fig. 9, the long distance sensor system contains two lasers at 1395 nm and 1480 nm. The powers used in the experiment of them are 30 dBm and 12.74 dBm, respectively. There are no additional lasers or electrical components along the ber. An all-ber sensor system is built by splicing SMF and EDF together. FBG is placed in the system as the sensing point. By using an optical spectrum analyzer (OSA) to monitor

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Fig. 12. FBG Bragg wavelengths as a function of the applied temperatures. Fig. 10. Reected spectrum of the system at the range from 1551 nm to 1562 nm.

Fig. 11. The reected spectra of FBG Bragg wavelength of the 100 km long distance FBG sensory system at four different temperatures.

Fig. 13. (a) The spectrum after the tunable lter with no strain on the FBG (Dashed line). (b) The spectrum after the tunable lter with the maximum vibration on the FBG (Solid line).

C. Vibration Sensor the reected signal, the Bragg wavelength of the FBG can be recorded when the environmental temperature changes. To illustrate the performance of this 150 km long distance FBG sensor system, four spectra at temperature 36.3 C, 42.3 C, 54.0 C and 67.1 C are recorded in Fig. 11. It is found that the Bragg wavelength of the FBG is shifting as the increase of the temperature. Fig. 12 shows the Bragg wavelength as a function of the applied temperature in the range from 35 C to 70 C. It is found that a good linearity for temperature measurement has been achieved, and the temperature sensitivity is 10.82 pm/ C. Our experiment has shown that our system has good repeatability. The accuracy is 1 C. The typical temperature measurement range is up to 120 C. Furthermore, the maximum temperature can be 300 C if the polyimide ber is used. It means that the temperatures along the ber can be measured by easily splicing a FBG at that required point, only if the wavelength of this FBG is not the same as other FBGs. In other words, this setup provides us a real long distance FBG sensor system. Fig. 10 shows the experimental setup for our proposed 150-km long distance FBG vibration sensor system. The FBG at 100 km is packaged and protected by the carbon ber composite as the vibration sensor, and then xed on the vibration platform. A tunable optical lter with 0.5-nm bandwidth is used to lter reected Bragg wavelength of the FBG. The reected spectrum of the system is measured by an optical spectrum analyzer (OSA), from which the reected Bragg wavelength of the FBG can be obtained. The photo-detector (PD) and the oscilloscope are placed after the tunable optical lter to monitor the power change, which is caused by the vibration applied on the FBG. As the vibration sensor system, a tunable lter is connected into the system, as shown in Fig. 9. The center wavelength of the lter is tuned to make the Bragg wavelength of the FBG locate at the left edge of the lter. The spectrum with dashed line after the tunable lter with no strain on the FBG is shown in Fig. 13(a). The average power at this situation is dBm. After applying the strain with the maximum strain value of the

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vibration platform is driven at the resonance frequency, from 1 Hz to 1000 Hz. The detected signal on oscilloscope in Fig. 14 is recorded when the vibration frequency is 13 Hz, which proves that the sensor system can detect the vibration frequency accurately. And the detected signal is also acquired by National Instrument (NI) DAQ card and then processed by the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) in the computer. Because of the vibration exciters tuning resolution, the vibration frequency is set to be 1.5 Hz, 100 Hz, 500.5 Hz, 1000 Hz. Detected frequency gotten from the computer are shown in Fig. 15. It can be found that the detected frequency matches the setting frequency very well. In the experiment, the detecting FBG is just attached to the vibration exciter by taper glue. The detected frequency cannot be more than 1100 Hz. If the attachment of the FBG1 to vibration exciter is improved, higher detecting frequency may be possible.
Fig. 14. The recorded waveform on the oscilloscope when the vibration frequency is 13 Hz.

IV. CONCLUSION In conclusion, we have demonstrated a novel stimulated Raman amplication and erbium doped ber based 150-km multi-point long distance FBG temperature and vibration ber sensing system. The proposed sensing system is only composed of two laser sources at 1395 nm (high power) and 1480 nm (low power) at the transmitter, two segments of EDF and the conventional single mode ber with the length of 150 km. The accuracy of the temperature sensor is about 1 C. And the vibration measurement range is 1 Hz to 1000 Hz. 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, 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. Opt. Fiber Sensors (OFS), 2003, Paper Th1-4. [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. 2, pp. 575577, Feb. 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. Exp., vol. 12, no. 15, pp. 35153520, 2004. [5] Y.-G. Han, T. V. A. Tran, J. H. Lee, and B. Sang, Long-distance remote simultaneous measurement of strain and temperature based on a Raman ber laser with a single FBG embedded in a quartz plate, in Proc. SPIE, 2006, vol. 6351. [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 Sens. J., vol. 8, no. 9, pp. 15981602, 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. 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. [9] J. Hu, Z. Chen, X. Yang, J. Ng, and C. Yu, 100-km long distance ber Bragg grating sensor system based on erbium-doped ber and Raman amplication, IEEE Photon. Technol. Lett., vol. 22, no. 19, pp. 14221424, Oct. 2010. [10] G.-L. Lan, P. K. Banerjee, and S. S. Mitra, Raman scattering in optical bers, J. Raman Spectrosc., vol. 11, no. 5, pp. 416423, 1981. [11] R. W. Hellwarth, Theory of stimulated Raman scattering, Phys. Rev., vol. 130, pp. 18501852, 1963. [12] R. G. Smith, Optical power handling capacity of low loss optical bers as determined by stimulated Raman and Brillouin scattering, Appl. Opt., vol. 11, pp. 24892494, 1972.

Fig. 15. Detected frequency displayed on computer after FFT, when vibration frequency is set on (a) 1.5 Hz, (b) 100 Hz, (c) 500.5 Hz, (d) 1000 Hz.

vibration platform, the spectrum is recorded as the solid line in Fig. 13(b). It is observed that the average power of dBm. It means the power difference at two strain situations is 8.53 dBm, which is a signicant difference when applying vibration on the FBG. After xing the FBG on the vibration platform, the detected signal is detected by the photo-detector and observed on an oscilloscope. During the measurements, the vibrator of the

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Junhao Hu received the B.Eng. degree in electrical engineering from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China, in 2007. He is currently working toward the Ph.D. degree at the National University of Singapore. His research focuses on advanced measurement technologies in optical ber sensor and communication systems.

Zhihao Chen received the B.Sc. degree from East China Normal University, China, the M.Sc. degree from Shanghai University of Science and Technology, Shanghai, China, and the Ph.D. degree from Tsinghua University, Tsinghua, China. In 1986, he joined Fujian Normal University, China, where he was engaged in the study of polarization-maintaining bers, optical waveguides, and ber couplers. In his Ph.D. studies at Tsinghua University from 1994 to 1997, he specialized in the fabrication and application of biconical bers for erbium-doped ber ampliers, ber lasers, ber sensors. From 1998 to 1999, he was a Senior Research Associate with the City University of Hong Kong, where he was engaged in the fabrication and application of ber gratings. From 19992001, he was a research fellow with the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, where he was working on ber grating and coupler based devices for wavelength division multiplexing system applications. From 20012004, he worked in Oluma as member of technical staff, working on a pressure/temperature system from concept to product for down hole application. Currently he is a Senior Scientist in Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore, specializing in ber sensors for health care and industrial applications. He has published more than 50 international journal papers and has 4 granted patents as inventor and co-inventor.

Changyuan Yu received the B.Sc. degree in applied physics and B.S. degree in economics in management from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 1997, the M.Sc. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Miami, Miami, FL, in 1999, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles, CA, in 2005. He has been an Assistant Professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore, and A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research since December 2005. He was a Visiting Researcher with NEC Laboratories America (September 2005 to December 2005), and a Visiting Professor with the University of Melbourne, Australia (May 2007 to July 2007). He has authored or coauthored four book chapters and over 100 research papers on the peer reviewed journals and the prestigious conferences. His research focuses on integrated electrooptical devices, optical interconnects, ber-optical devices and subsystems, ber sensors, and high-speed optical ber communication systems and networks. Dr. Yu was the recipient of the IEEE/LEOS Graduate Student Fellowship Award in 2004.