Optical Passive Components

Fiber Optic Components for Fiber Optic Gyroscope Applications

The gyroscope is an inertial system to the core component, which is used to measure the angular velocity of the
moving carrier relative to the inertial space to the angular motion, and combines the displacement and the linear
velocity generated by the linear velocity measured by the accelerometer to obtain an integral operation. The
real-time posture, speed, position and other information of the carrier.
The basic principle of fiber optic gyroscopes is the Sagnac effect proposed by G. Sagnac in 1913, that is, the
phase difference between two light waves propagating in opposite directions along a closed loop is proportional
to the input angular velocity in the normal direction of the closed optical path. Since the concept of fiber optic
gyroscope was first proposed in 1976 and experimentally realized for nearly 40 years, the development of fiber
optic gyroscope has also made great progress, and its development has also benefited from fiber optic
communication in recent years. The rapid development of the field has greatly improved the stability and reliability
of optical components.

Compared with other types of gyroscopes, the main advantages of fiber optic gyroscopes are mainly in small size,
light weight, low power consumption, long life, high reliability, and mass production, so they are in the gyroscope.
The proportion of applications has increased year by year. The application of fiber optic gyroscope is mainly
embodied in three aspects of positioning, attitude control and absolute measurement. It has a vital military role
and has an irreplaceable advantage in the civilian field.

Fiber optic gyroscope working principle

At present, the application of the fiber optic gyroscope is basically interference type. Since the length of the
sensing fiber can reach several kilometers by using a specific fiber winding method, the sensitivity of the fiber
gyroscope can also meet the requirements of the medium and low precision gyroscope.

The fiber optic gyroscope includes an optical portion and a signal processing portion, and a common structural
view of the optical fiber optic gyro optical portion using the integrated optical waveguide is as follows.

Integrated optical
Light source waveguide Fiber coils
Coupler

Polarization
Detector Controller
Phase modulator

Figure 1: Block diagram of the optical path of an interferometric fiber optic gyroscope.

a) Light source selection

The light source provides the required optical signal for the fiber optic gyroscope, and the factors affecting the
accuracy of the fiber optic gyroscope mainly include: optical wavelength stability, power stability and polarization
stability. At present, the commonly used fiber optic gyroscope light sources are Super-Luminescent Diode (SLD)
and Amplified Spontaneous Emission (ASE) using erbium-doped fiber.

The above content is for reference only, DK Photonics does not assume any responsibility.

December 2018 DK Photonics reserves the right to change any specifications without prior notice. DK-XS-DT-003-B/3
 Optical Passive Components

Fiber Optic Components for Fiber Optic Gyroscope Applications

SLD sources have poor average wavelength stability and are suitable for use in low precision fiber optic
gyroscopes. The ASE source has a much higher spectral width and spectral stability than the SLD source, and the
output power is also high. The basic principle of the ASE light source is to amplify the spontaneous emission signal
generated by the erbium-doped fiber under the action of pump light. The structure of the ASE light source using the
double-pass backward structure is as follows: The specific structure is as follows:

EDF FRM
980nm WDM
Pump

Filter Isolator
1550nm
Output

Figure 2: Structure diagram of the ASE source.

980 nm pump: 980 nm pump laser;

WDM (Wavelength Division Multiplexing): 980/1550 nm wavelength division multiplexer;
EDF (Er-Doped Fiber): erbium-doped fiber;
FRM (Fiber Rotation Mirror): Faraday rotator Mirror;
ISO (Isolator): optical isolator;
Filter: Optical filter.

b) Polarization control
Polarization fluctuation is one of the key factors affecting the performance of the gyro. In order to control the drift
caused by polarization instability in the fiber optic gyroscope, usually the fiber coil adopts a polarization
maintaining fiber, so the devices in the optical path part also need to adopt a polarization device, such as a
polarization maintaining coupler, a polarization maintaining isolator, etc., in the integrated optical path. The
polarization control part is a polarizer, which can ensure the gyro performance is greatly improved, but the cost is
also high.

In addition, depolarization technology can also be used, so that the fiber coil only needs to use ordinary
single-mode fiber, the device in the optical path part does not need to use the polarization maintaining device, and
the polarization control device needs to use the fiber depolarizer.

DK Photonics offers a variety of passive components with compact package for building Fiber Optic Gyroscope
systems. Contact DK Photonics regarding your requirements.

The above content is for reference only, DK Photonics does not assume any responsibility.

Web-site: http://www.dkphotonics.com/ Email: sales@dkphotonics.com DK-XS-DT-003-B/3