The MIIT Key Laboratory of Advanced Solid Laser, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing 210094, Jiangsu, China.
The Advanced Launching Co-Innovation Center, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing 210094, Jiangsu, China.
Sensors (Basel). 2018 Oct 19;18(10):3548. doi: 10.3390/s18103548.
Interferometric fiber-optic sensors are often organized in the form of large-scale arrays by lending the technique of time division multiplexing (TDM) to reduce the system cost. Discriminating the time windows for different sensor units is the prerequisite to successfully demodulate the sensing message, but it traditionally calls for a very time-consuming manual calibration process. To combat this problem, a novel automatic time window locating method is proposed in this paper. It introduces the concept of shape function and carries out the cross-correlation operation between the shape function and the sensor signal. The shape function is defined as the function whose curve profile reflects the main data characteristics of the sensor signal. The time window information is then extracted from the correlation result. This whole process is carried out automatically by the interrogation controller of the sensor system without any manual intervene. Experiments are conducted to validate this method. The proposed method can greatly reduce the complexity of locating time windows in large-scale TDM sensor arrays, and make the practical use of the TDM scheme much more convenient.
干涉型光纤传感器通常通过时分复用（TDM）技术来组织成大规模阵列，以降低系统成本。区分不同传感器单元的时间窗口是成功解调传感信息的前提，但传统上需要非常耗时的手动校准过程。为了解决这个问题，本文提出了一种新颖的自动时间窗口定位方法。它引入了形状函数的概念，并对形状函数和传感器信号进行互相关运算。形状函数被定义为其曲线形状反映传感器信号主要数据特征的函数。然后，从相关结果中提取时间窗口信息。这个过程完全由传感器系统的询问控制器自动完成，无需任何人工干预。实验验证了该方法的有效性。所提出的方法可以大大降低大规模 TDM 传感器阵列中时间窗口定位的复杂性，使 TDM 方案的实际应用更加方便。
