Highly sensitive dynamic strain measurements by locking lasers to fiber Bragg gratings

Abstract

A novel, sensitive, simple, and robust strain interrogation technique is analyzed and experimentally tested. By locking a laser wavelength to the midreflection wavelength of a standard fiber Bragg grating and measuring the error signal, we achieve high dynamic strain sensitivity of 45 picostrain/ radicalHz rms at 3 kHz, where the dominant noise in the experiment is the laser frequency noise.