Abstract

By exploiting the parallelism and high speed operation of optics, a hybrid joint transform correlator (JTC) can be used for the dynamic processing of a fiber speckle sensor (FSS). The technique is capable of performing dynamic analysis for temperature, pressure, stress, and other variations in a composite structure and in a hazardous environment. The proposed method uses a multimode fiber, by which various sensing aspects can be multiplexed in a single fiber. Analysis and simulated results indicate that the fiber speckle field is highly sensitive to fiber status changes, in which a dynamic sensing system using a JTC can be realized. A preliminary experiment applying the system to sense temperature and strain–stress variations has been conducted. We have shown that this proposed JTC-FSS system offers the advantage of large dynamic range operation with high speed.

© 1992 Optical Society of America