A novel application of temperature monitoring using an optical fiber sensor based on time offset

High response rate and sensitivity are the crucial performance parameters for optical fiber temperature sensors and are fundamental in the study of optical fiber sensing. Considering that the traditional optical fiber sensing system cannot meet high response rate and sensitivity simultaneously, in this paper we present the design of an optical fiber temperature measurement method to achieve real-time temperature sensing with high resolution. The measurement system is made up of single-mode optical fiber and a picosecond laser. A combination of time offset measurement and the differential calculation method is used to extract the temperature information in the optical fiber, and the relationship between temperature changes and the time offset in the optical fiber is established. The novel optical fiber temperature measurement system based on time offset has been proved to provide an effective way to measure temperature. Experimental results show that the nonlinearity of the optical fiber temperature sensor can reach 99.5%, the response time was in the range of picoseconds, and the resolution of the sensor was approximately 0.05m
^o
C, thus the output of the sensor is accurate enough to meet the requirement for real-time measurement of temperature around the optical fiber. The proposed idea of the optical fiber temperature sensing system based on time offset and differential technology is new. The results of this paper prove that the kind of optical fiber sensor based on time offset has effective features and is precise enough for temperature monitoring in real situations.