Microwave photonics filtering technique for interrogating long weak fiber Bragg grating sensors

A system to interrogate photonic sensors based on long weak fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs) is presented and experimentally demonstrated, dedicated to measure the precise location of several spot events. The principle of operation is based on a technique used to analyze microwave photonics (MWP) filters. The long weak FBGs are used as quasi-distributed sensors. Several events can be detected along the FBG device with a spatial accuracy under 1 mm using a modulator and a photo-detector (PD) with a modest bandwidth of less than 500 MHz. The simple proposed scheme is intrinsically robust against environmental changes and easy to reconfigure.