Phase noise suppression of optic flexural disk accelerometer by studying the thermal stability of optical fiber ring.

ABSTRACT

As the core sensing elements of ultra-long fiber interferometer, the distributed thermal strain difference of the fiber rings can cause extra noise of the flexural disk, resulting in a penalty of the deterioration accuracy. In this paper, the thermal strain distribution characteristics of the fiber ring are firstly analyzed by the finite element method (FEM), and the distribution result is consistent with that demonstrated by the Rayleigh optical frequency-domain reflectometry (R-OFDR) strain measurement. The interferometer phase noise caused by the distributed strain difference is further studied by constructing a fully symmetric polarization-maintaining fiber-ring Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) with an arm length of over 100 meters. The results show that the distributed thermal strain difference of two fiber rings will cause additional phase fluctuation, which leads to higher low-frequency noise. Therefore, a dual-fiber-ring MZI with matched distributed thermal strains is proposed to suppress the phase noise caused by the thermal strain, and the best suppression is as high as 45.6 dB. This is very important for the research and design of low noise fiber seismometer.