The resonant fiber optic gyro (RFOG) is a high accuracy inertial rotation sensor based on the Sagnac effect. The existence of various noises, including the nonreciprocal noises such as the polarization noise and the Kerr noise as well as the reciprocal circuit noise, limits the performance improvement of the RFOG. An improved scheme by inserting two in-line polarizers in the polarization maintaining fiber transmission-type resonator has been proposed to suppress the polarization-fluctuation induced drift. Furthermore, the adoption of the air-core photonic bandgap fibers (PBFs) offers a novel solution to reduce the optical Kerr effect. In addition, A digital signal processor is designed to reduce the reciprocal noises and detect the rotation information. A minimum actual rotation of 0.001°/s is achieved. The dynamic range is improved by a factor of 7 and the scale factor nonlinearity is decreased by a factor of 60.

Date Published: 8 October 2015
PDF: 5 pages
Proc. SPIE 9679, AOPC 2015: Optical Fiber Sensors and Applications, 967906 (8 October 2015); doi: 10.1117/12.2197580

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9679:
AOPC 2015: Optical Fiber Sensors and Applications
Yanbiao Liao; Weixu Zhang; Desheng Jiang; Wei Wang; Gilberto Brambilla, Editor(s)