《Erbium Fiber Laser Accelerometer》.pdf

IEEE SENSORS JOURNAL, VOL. 7, NO. 4, APRIL 2007 557 Erbium Fiber Laser Accelerometer Gregory H. Ames, Member, IEEE, and Jason M. Maguire Abstract—A new form of fiber accelerometer based on an erbium fiber laser sensor is presented. The transducer is a unique shape de- rived by an automated finite element analysis design optimization program and is constructed using stereolithography. Index Terms—Accelerometer, fiber laser, laser sensor, optical fiber sensor. I. INTRODUCTION RBIUM-DOPED fiber laser sensors have been shown Eto exhibit high strain sensitivity rivaling that achieved in fiber interferometer systems [1]. Fiber laser sensors also exhibit promise for multiplexing many sensors per fiber in Fig. 1. Basic fiber laser sensor system. large channel count sensor arrays [2]. By varying the design of the “transducer” these lasers can be configured to sense a eter to allow self-homodyne demodulation of the interferometer variety of measurands. Recently, performance as hydrophone signal [8]. pressure sensors [3] and accelerometers [4] have been reported. The goal is to design transducers which maximize the sensi- To date, high-performance optical accelerometers have been tivity to acceleration from a desired direction, while minimizing based on fiber interferometric sensors [5], [6]. However, these