High sensitivity optical fiber temperature sensor based on the temperature cross-sensitivity feature of RI-sensitive device

Considerable part of optical fiber refractive index (RI) sensors suffer from the drawback of cross-sensitivity to temperature because of the thermo-optic effect of materials. In this paper, we propose a straightforward method to utilize the temperature cross-sensitivity feature of an optical fiber RI-sensitive device and thus got a high sensitivity temperature sensor. The sensor consists of a single mode fiber-multimode fiber core(MMFC)-single mode fiber structural refractometer encapsulated into a deionized water-filled cylindrical aluminum alloy shell. Benefiting from the larger thermo-optic coefficient difference between water and MMFC compared with the general cladding and core, the wavelength of transmitted spectrum presents enhanced shift when the ambient temperature change and thus get a higher temperature sensitivity. Experimental results show that the enhanced temperature sensitivity is about 358 pm/°C, which is almost 30 times that of the inherent temperature sensitivity.