Distributed optical fiber magnetic field sensor based on polarization-sensitive OFDR.

Area of Science:

• Optoelectronics
• Fiber Optics Sensing
• Magnetometry

Background:

• Distributed optical fiber sensors offer remote and real-time monitoring capabilities.
• Polarization-sensitive optical frequency domain reflectometry (POFDR) is a technique for measuring parameters in optical fibers.
• Conventional POFDR methods for magnetic field sensing often require complex adjustments of input polarization.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose and experimentally validate a distributed optical fiber magnetic field sensor.
• To overcome limitations of conventional POFDR by eliminating the need for input polarization adjustments.
• To achieve accurate and reliable magnetic field component extraction.

Main Methods:

• Utilizing a polarization-sensitive optical frequency domain reflectometer (POFDR) setup.
• Combining Stokes vectors and backward Mueller matrices from measured states of polarization (SOPs).
• Extracting accumulated Faraday rotation to determine the magnetic field component.

Main Results:

• The developed sensor successfully measured magnetic field components.
• Experimental verification demonstrated good repeatability and linearity of the sensor.
• The magnetic field sensor achieved a measurement error of 19.4 mT.
• Measured magnetic field variations showed high agreement (similarity > 0.98) with applied fields.

Conclusions:

• The proposed POFDR-based sensor effectively measures magnetic fields in a distributed manner.
• The method simplifies the sensing process by avoiding input polarization adjustments.
• The sensor exhibits promising performance for practical magnetic field sensing applications.