Effect of Peak Tracking Methods on FBG Calibration Derived by Factorial Design of Experiment.

We present a calibration procedure for a humidity sensor made of a fiber Bragg grating covered by a polyimide layer. FBGs being intrinsically sensitive to temperature and strain, the calibration should tackle three variables, and, therefore, consists of a three-variable, two-level factorial design tailored to assess the three main sensitivities, as well as the five cross-sensitivities. FBG sensing information is encoded in the reflection spectrum from which the Bragg wavelength should be extracted. We tested six classical peak tracking methods on the results of the factorial design of the experiment applied to a homemade FBG humidity sensor. We used Python programming to compute, from the raw spectral data with six typical peak search algorithms, the temperature, strain and humidity sensitivities, as well as the cross-sensitivities, and showed that results are consistent for all algorithms, provided that the points selected to make the computation are correctly chosen. The best results for this particular sensor are obtained with a 3 dB threshold, whatever the peak search method used, and allow to compute the effective humidity sensitivity taking into account the combined effect of temperature and strain. The calibration procedure presented here is nevertheless generic and can thus be adapted to other sensors.