Optical Frequency Domain Reflectometry Based Quasi-distributed High Temperature Sensor

Abstract

Temperature sensing in harsh environment is desired in many areas, such as coal gasification, aerospace, etc. Single crystal sapphire is an excellent candidate for construction of harsh environment sensors due to its superior mechanical and optical properties even at temperature beyond 1600°C. The temperature inside a coal gasifier can be as high as 1200°C. And there is dramatic temperature gradient between the inner and outer layers of the gasifier refractory. Previous work has been done at Virginia Tech's Center for Photonics Technology to design and fabricate a sapphire wafer based Fabry-Perot interferometer (FPI) sensor for temperature sensing in coal gasifiers. The sensor head is based on the use of sapphire wafer which is attached to a lead-in sapphire fiber to be applied in the ultrahigh temperature region; and the sapphire fiber is spliced to a multi-mode fused silica fiber for quality signal transmission in lower temperature areas. One of the challenges encountered by this approach is the shear force to the sapphire fiber, which is caused by the differential thermal expansion between the inner and outer layers of the gasifier refractory. This shear force may be so significant to break the sensor probe. This thesis proposed a free space based interrogation sensing system to address that problem. In this free space based interrogation sensing system, only the sensor head is placed in the inner refractory wall, while all the other parts of the system are placed in the outer refractory or outside the gasifier at the ambient room temperature. An optical frequency domain reflectometry (OFDR) based multiplexed technique is applied in the sensor design to realize temperature measurement at multiple locations along the optical path. In this work, three sapphire wafers based multiplexed temperature sensor is fabricated and calibrated in laboratory. This multiplexed high temperature sensor shows linear response in the range of 20°C ~ 1000°C, with a sensitivity of 1.602?10??/°C and a resolution of 1.3°C.