Time-Division-Multiplexed Interferometric Sensor Arrays

Abstract

We propose and experimentally demonstrate a time-division-multiplexed acoustic sensor array employing multiple low-gain Er-doped fiber amplifiers to multiplex ten compact Fabry-Perot acoustic sensors. We show that the ten sensors can be interrogated with a single laser diode at a single wavelength, and exhibit the same measured SNR within <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex Notation="TeX">$\pm$</tex></formula> 0.95 dB of each other. We present a model to identify the dominant noise contributions, and their dependence on the number of multiplexed sensors. This model predicts that more than 350 sensors can be multiplexed with the proposed architecture.