Performance of a single reflective grating-based fiber optic accelerometer

Abstract

This paper presents a single reflective grating-based fiber optic accelerometer that can monitor the low-frequency acceleration of civil engineering structures. A simpler sensor structure was realized by employing a single reflective grating panel and two optical fibers as transceivers rather than the moire fringe fiber optic accelerometer, which is composed of two gratings and four optical fibers. The simplified layout contributes to resolving the issues of space restraints during installation and complex cabling problems in transmission of fiber optic accelerometers. The measured oscillated displacement and sinusoidal acceleration from the proposed fiber optic sensor demonstrated good agreement with those of a commercial laser displacement sensor and an accelerometer without electromagnetic interference. The developed fiber optic accelerometer can be used in frequency ranges below 4 Hz within a 5% error margin and high sensitivity of 33.33 rad G(-1). Furthermore, in comparison with the conventional transmission fiber optic accelerometer design, the proposed scheme's cable design is simplified by 50%.