A novel temperature-insensitive fiber Bragg grating sensor for displacement measurement

Abstract

This paper presents the design and development of an optical fiber Bragg grating based displacement sensor. A fiber Bragg grating is glued at a slant orientation onto the lateral side of a specially designed cantilever beam. It is found that the bandwidth of the FBG based sensor changes linearly with the variation of the displacement at the free end of the beam due to the displacement-induced strain gradient. Displacement sensing is realized by measuring the reflected optical power of the signal from the grating with a photodetector. A linear response of 37.9 mV mm−1 was obtained within a displacement range of 9.0 mm. This sensor is also cost-effective due to the use of a simple demodulation method and is inherently temperature insensitive, eliminating the need for temperature compensation.