Temperature-independent accelerometer with a strain-chirped fiber Bragg grating

A novel fiber optic accelerometer is proposed and demonstrated. The sensing mechanism is based on the measurement of bandwidth and optical power of a strain-chirped fiber Bragg grating (FBG). An initially-uniform FBG is glued with a slanted direction onto the lateral surface of a simply-supported beam. Two masses are fixed on the top and bottom surfaces in the middle of the beam respectively, which can transfer the vertical acceleration to the deflection of the beam. Therefore, deflection induced nouniform strain is applied along the sensing FBG and makes it chirped. Experimental results show that 3-dB bandwidth and reflected optical power of the strain-chirped FBG responds to acceleration sensitively. The achieved sensitivities are up to 0.4 nm/g and 4.57 µW/g respectively in the linear range. Furthermore, this sensor is very cost-effective and inherently insensitive to temperature due to the simple demodulation method.