Dependence of measurement accuracy on the birefringence of PANDA fiber Bragg gratings in distributed simultaneous strain and temperature sensing.

By both simulation and experiment, we studied the relationship of the measurement accuracy and the birefringence of the distributed simultaneous strain and temperature sensor using polarization-maintaining fiber Bragg gratings (PANDA-FBGs). The PANDA-FBGs were applied to an optical frequency domain reflectometry (OFDR) which is capable of distributed measurement at high spatial resolution and sampling rate. The simulated results had agreement with the experimental results that the measurement accuracy of both strain and temperature were improved by increasing the birefringence. Additionally, the efficiency of the accuracy improvements decreased when accuracy increased.