Cascaded fiber MZIs for simultaneous measurement of pressure and temperature

Abstract A hybrid cascade structure composed of two Mach–Zehnder interferometers (MZI) is proposed and demonstrated to measure gas pressure and temperature, simultaneously. The key sensing components of the two MZIs are all based on a tapered single mode fiber (TSMF) spliced between two multimode optical fibers. The difference is that one of the TSMFs is covered with PDMS material, while the other one is exposed to air. Because of the large changes in the refractive index versus air pressure and the high thermo-optic coefficient of PDMS, the MZI covered with PDMS has a high sensitivity to gas pressure and temperature. While the MZI exposed to air has only high gas pressure sensitivity because the air is directly involved in the sensing as a signal of interferometer and the effective refractive index of air varies with the pressure. Experimental results show that the gas pressure and temperature sensitivities of the MZI filled with PDMS can be as high as 78.553 nm/MPa and 8.455 nm/°C, respectively, and another MZI can obtain −8.405 nm/MPa and 0.038 nm/°C, respectively. Therefore, the simultaneous measurement can be achieved by utilizing two MZIs with different gas pressure and temperature sensitivities.