GEOMETRIC REPRESENTATION OF ERRORS IN MEASUREMENTS OF STRAIN AND TEMPERATURE

Many optical fiber sensors, designed to recover quasistatic strain fie lds in the presence of significant temperature changes, have been repo rted in recent years. A number of recent publications have attempted t o devise a method for assessing the relative performances of such sens ing schemes. Here we report an analysis that represents the data recov ery process from a geometrical standpoint and provides useful insight into the physical differences between measurement schemes. The perform ance of methods based on Bragg grating sensors, polarization-maintaini ng Fabry-Perot interferometers, combined dual-mode interference-polari metry sensors, and dispersive Fourier-transform spectroscopy measureme nts are contrasted, (C) 1997 Society of Photo-Optical instrumentation Engineers.