Strain and temperature discrimination using concatenated fiber grating lasers

We propose and experimentally demonstrate a novel simultaneous strain and temperature fiber optic sensor based on radio-frequency measurement. The sensing head is formed by two concatenated ultra-short distributed Bragg reflector lasers that operate in single longitude mode with two polarization modes. The total length of the sensing head is only 18 mm. The two lasers generate two polarization mode beat notes in the radio-frequency range which show different frequency response to strain and temperature. Simultaneous strain and temperature measurement can be achieved by radio-frequency measurement. This approach has distinctive advantages of ease of interrogation and avoidance of expensive wavelength detection.