Highly sensitive and reconfigurable fiber optic current sensor by optical recirculating in a fiber loop.

An advanced fiber optic current sensor (FOCS) is proposed based on recirculating fiber loop architecture for significantly enhancing the current sensitivity. The recirculating loop is constructed by a 2X2 optical switch and the standard single mode fiber (SSMF) is used as the sensing head. The proposed FOCS is coupler-free with low insertion loss which results in a significantly improved current sensitivity. We experimentally obtained a sensitivity of 11.5 degrees/A for 1-Km SSMF FOCS and a sensitivity of 21.2 degrees/A for 500-m SSMF FOCS, both of which have been enhanced by more than ten times. The flexible switch control of recirculating can support the FOCS to work for different current scenarios with the same system and thus reconfigurable operation of the FOCS has been achieved. The significantly enhanced high sensitivity with reconfigurable operation capability makes the proposed FOCS a promising method for practical applications.