Intensity-modulated relative humidity sensing with polyvinyl alcohol coating and optical fiber gratings

Appl Opt. 2015 Apr 1;54(10):2620-4. doi: 10.1364/AO.54.002620.

Abstract

A relative humidity (RH) sensor in reflection mode is proposed and experimentally demonstrated by using a polyvinyl alcohol (PVA)-coated tilted-fiber Bragg grating (TFBG) cascaded by a reflection-band-matched chirped-fiber Bragg grating (CFBG). The sensing principle is based on the RH-dependent refractive index of the PVA coating, which modulates the transmission function of the TFBG. The CFBG is properly designed to reflect a broadband of light spectrally suited at the cladding mode resonance region of the TFBG, thus the reflected optical signal passes through and is modulated by the TFBG again. As a result, RH measurements with enhanced sensitivity of ∼1.80 μW/%RH are realized and demodulated in the range from 20% RH to 85% RH.