Simultaneous strain and temperature sensor based on the numerical reconstruction of polarization maintaining fiber Bragg gratings

When a short-length fiber Bragg grating is inscribed into a polarization-maintaining fiber, the resonant peaks produced by birefringence can overlap. In this case, the discrimination between strain and temperature effects is only possible by means of polarization control devices, i.e. a linear polarizer and a polarization controller. To avoid this complexity and the measurement errors that it involves, we propose a novel demodulation technique based on the numerical reconstruction of the grating physical parameters. Our technique evaluates the grating parameters from the amplitude spectrum by means of the coupled-mode equations. The convergence tool used to search the solutions is the Nelder–Mead simplex algorithm. The method is tested on uniform and apodized Bragg gratings and a very good accuracy is reported. The method is finally applied to a 2 mm-long uniform polarization-maintaining grating in order to simultaneously measure longitudinal strain and temperature.