Zigzag pattern of Brillouin OF sensor for spatial resolution enhancement

Brillouin optical fiber (OF) sensing technology shows superior potential for structural health monitoring with the advantages of distributed strain and temperature measurement, immunity of electromagnetic interference and so on. However most of current commercial Brillouin OF sensing systems have encountered spatial resolution bottleneck, which cannot deal with local high-precision measurement. A zigzag pattern of Brillouin OF sensor is developed explicitly for spatial resolution enhancement in this paper, and a relative zigzag optical fiber sensor is produced and packaged by fiber reinforced polymer (FRP). Their characteristics are studied by using the strain measurement of one small-size uniform strength beam. From the experiments, the zigzag pattern exhibits excellent performance for strain measurement with high-precision and enhances the spatial resolution to a certain degree without changing the Brillouin sensing instrument's performance itself.