An Optical Fiber Displacement Sensor Using RF Interrogation Technique.

We propose a novel non-contact optical fiber displacement sensor. It uses a radio frequency (RF) interrogation technique which is based on bidirectional modulation of a Mach-Zehnder electro-optical modulator (MZ-EOM). The displacement is measured from the free spectral range (FSR) which is determined by the dip frequencies of the modulated MZ-EOM transfer function. In experiments, the proposed sensor showed a sensitivity of 456 kHz/mm or 1.043 kHz/V in a measurement range of 7 mm. The displacement resolution of the proposed sensor depends on the linewidth and the power of the optical source. Resolution better than 0.05 mu m would be achieved if an optical source which has a linewidth narrower than 1.5 nm and a received power larger than -36 dBm is used. Also, the multiplexing characteristic of the proposed sensor was experimentally validated.