Sensitivity enhanced fiber sensor based on a fiber ring microwave photonic filter with the Vernier effect

A temperature sensor employing the Vernier effect generated from a cascaded fiber rings based microwave photonic filter (MPF) is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. The structure of the fiber ring is used as a sensing element as well as the sampling and delaying component of the MPF in our proposed sensing scheme. The sensing characteristics of both single ring and cascaded fiber rings based sensors have been studied and compared. By employing two cascaded fiber rings of slightly different length, the Vernier effect can be generated in the frequency response of the MPF. The sensing interrogation of the cascaded fiber rings based sensor is conducted by detecting the frequency shift of the upper envelope of the measured frequency response curve. The experimental results show that the sensitivity of the cascaded fiber rings based sensor can be improved about 30 times compared with the single fiber ring based temperature sensor.