Four-wavelength quadrature phase demodulation technique for extrinsic Fabry-Perot interferometric sensors

In this Letter, we report a four-wavelength quadrature phase demodulation technique for extrinsic Fabry-Perot interferometric (EFPI) sensors and dynamic signals. Four interferometric signals are obtained from four different laser wavelengths. A wavelength interval of four wavelengths is chosen according to the free spectrum range (FSR) of EFPI sensors to generate two groups of anti-phase signals and two groups of orthogonal signals. The linear fitting (LF) method is applied to two groups of anti-phase signals to eliminate the dc component and ac amplitude to obtain two normalized orthogonal signals. The differential cross multiplication (DCM) method is then used to demodulate the phase signal from these two normalized orthogonal signals. The proposed LF and DCM (LF-DCM) based four-wavelength quadrature phase demodulation overcomes the drawback of the traditional ellipse fitting (EF) and DCM (EF-DCM) based dual-wavelength demodulation method that it is not suitable for weak signal demodulation since the ellipse degenerates into a straight line, which makes the EF algorithm invalid. Moreover, it also avoids the assumption that the dc component and ac amplitude of interferometric signals are identical, which is widely used in three-wavelength demodulation. An EFPI acoustic sensor is tested to prove the four-wavelength quadrature phase demodulation and experimental results show that the proposed phase demodulation method shows advantages of large dynamic range and wide frequency band. Linearity is as high as 0.9999 and a high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is observed from 1 Hz to 100 kHz.