Study on fiber-optic low-coherence interferometric and fiber bragg grating sensors

This article reviews author's research work on fiber-optic sensors over the last twenty years. It includes two aspects: low-coherence interferometric sensors (LCI) and fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensors. For LCI sensors, author's work mainly focuses on the interrogation and multiplexing methods for Fizeau and Fabry-Perot interferometric sensors at the University of Kent at Canterbury (UKC), UK, and study on novel Fabry-Perot interferometric sensors and their multiplexing methods at Chongqing University (CQU) and University of Electronic Science & Technology of China (UESTC), China, respectively. For FBG sensors, a number of multiplexing schemes are proposed and demonstrated at UKC, and then novel methods for realization of multi-parameter measurement and long-distance measurement based on the FBG sensor and its combination with other optical fiber sensors are also reported at CQU & UESTC. Thus, author's study on these two topics can be divided into two periods, at UKC and at CQU & UESTC, China. This review is presented in such a time sequence. © The Author(s) 2011.