New electro-optic sensor architecture for temperature measurements

The authors show in this paper, the first results on the feasibility of a new electro-optic sensor architecture used for temperature measurements. This sensor is based on the birefringent variation of an optical material. This phenomena is well-known and often exploited for electric field measurements (Kuo et al., 2000, Cecelja et al., 2002) or temperature measurements (Jeon & Kim, 2004). All these sensors use the refractive index variation induced on a crystal placed into a polarimetric setup. Optical intensities variations due to temperature variation enable to determine the value of the temperature. Nevertheless, for most of the authors, the electronic part of these sensors in not the main interest, thatpsilas why, the optical part was described and the authors focused on the electronic instrumentation of this sensor. This one is based on an electronic detector which remains its output directly proportionnal to the temperature variation (Claverie et al., 2006). The temperature value is obtained by a control of the static intensity at a specific operating point of the transmittance. The results show that this architecture offers a high linearity and has a short response time (50ms).