A fiber grating sensor capable of distinguishing between temperature and strain, using a reference and a dual-wavelength fiber Bragg grating, is presented. Error analysis and measurement uncertainty for this sensor are studied theoretically and experimentally. The measured root mean squared errors for temperature T and strain ε were estimated to be 0.13 °C and 6 με, respectively. The maximum errors for temperature and strain were calculated as 0.00155 T + 2.90 × 10(-6) ε and 3.59 × 10(-5) ε + 0.01887 T, respectively. Using the estimation of expanded uncertainty at 95% confidence level with a coverage factor of k = 2.205, temperature and strain measurement uncertainties were evaluated as 2.60 °C and 32.05 με, respectively. For the first time, to our knowledge, we have demonstrated the feasibility of estimating the measurement uncertainty for simultaneous strain-temperature sensing with such a fiber grating sensor.
Keywords: error analysis; fiber Bragg grating; measurement uncertainty; sensor; strain; temperature.