Temperature compensation of a fiber optic strain sensor based on Brillouin scattering

Abstract

Brillouin scattering-based fiber optic sensors are useful to measure strain or temperature in a distributed manner. Since the Brillouin frequency of an optical fiber depends on both the strain and temperature, it is very important to know whether the Brillouin frequency shift is caused by the strain change or temperature change. This article presents a temperature compensation technique of a Brillouin scattering-based fiber optic strain sensor. Both the changes of the Brillouin frequency and the Brillouin gain power is observed for the temperature compensation using a BOTDA sensor system. Experimental results showed that the temperature compensated strain values were highly consistent with actual strain values.