Temperature-insensitive arrayed waveguide grating demodulation technique for fiber Bragg grating sensors

•An AWG temperature compensation algorithm not by hardware was obtained.•The experiment proved that this technique can improve the demodulation accuracy.•This technique can be used in intelligent clothing for temperature measurement.

As the output characteristics of arrayed waveguide grating (AWG) can be affected by temperature, the output spectrum central wavelength λi of every channel has a tendency to drift with the temperature. To improve demodulation accuracy, this paper presents a type of AWG demodulation algorithm with temperature compensation. This algorithm assumes that under the same environment, with similarly changing temperatures of AWG and fiber Bragg grating (FBG), the AWG central wavelength is replaced with the expression that includes ΔT, and the values of AWG and of FBG which change with the temperature (ΔT) are integrated. The experiment result shows that when temperature compensation is added in the demodulation technique, the correlation coefficient r of the demodulation result is 0.997, which means that the curve has good consistency and can be measured repeatedly. This also proves the rightness of the technique. The application of this technique for smart clothing is mentioned, which indicates its feasibility.