Temperature-insensitive transverse load sensing with improved accuracy using stress induced birefringence effects of fiber Bragg grating

Different from the basic sensing theory of the fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensors based on direct spectral analysis, a new method exploiting the polarization properties of FBG for temperature-insensitive transverse load sensing is proposed. In this paper, the birefringence effects on FBG under transverse load are analyzed. The evolution of the polarization dependent loss (PDL) of FBG with wavelength for the transmitted signals with respect to the transverse load is also studied theoretically and experimentally. We proposed utilizing the PDL evolution of FBG to precisely recover the wavelength spacing between the two peaks of x-mode and y-mode for accurate transverse load measurement. Good agreements between experimental results and numerical simulations had been obtained.