Waveform reconstruction for an ultrasonic fiber Bragg grating sensor demodulated by an erbium fiber laser

Fiber Bragg grating (FBG) demodulated by an erbium fiber laser (EFL) has been used for ultrasonic detection recently. However, due to the inherent relaxation oscillation (RO) of the EFL, the detected ultrasonic signals have large deformations, especially in the low-frequency range. We proposed a novel data processing method to reconstruct an actual ultrasonic waveform. The noise spectrum was smoothed first; the actual ultrasonic spectrum was then obtained by deconvolution in order to mitigate the influence of the RO of the EFL. We proved by experiment that this waveform reconstruction method has high precision, and demonstrated that the FBG sensor demodulated by the EFL will have large practical applications in nondestructive testing. (C) 2015 Optical Society of America