Packaging and Temperature Compensation of Fiber Bragg Grating for Strain Sensing: A Survey

During last decades, sensor elements based on the fiber Bragg grating (FBG) have been widely studied and developed due to the advantages of immunity to electromagnetic interference, compact size, high precision, and so on. The FBG itself is sensitive to axial strain and temperature variation directly and can indirectly measure these complex physical parameters, such as pressure, displacement, and vibration, by using some specially designed elastic structures to convert them into the axial strain of the FBG. Whether the FBG is fixed on the measured object to measure the strain directly or fixed on an elastic structure body to measure other physical quantities, these types of FBGs could be collectively called as strain sensing FBGs. The packaging of the FBG has important influence on FBG characteristics that directly affect the measurement accuracy, such as strain transfer, temperature characteristic, and spectral shape. This paper summarizes the packaging methods and corresponding temperature compensation methods of the currently reported strain sensing FBGs, focusing especially on fully pasted FBG, pre-stretched FBG with double-end fixed, and metallic packaging. Furthermore, the advantages and drawbacks of different packaging methods have been analyzed, which can provide a reference for future researches.