A Study on Fiber Optic Hydrophone with Double Interferometers for Optical Path Length Compensation

We report on the development of a fiber optic hydrophone consists of a sensing Michelson interferometer and a compensating Mach-Zehnder interferometer for optical path length compensation. The double interferometer configuration has the following advantages: the hydrophone can be made more small; a laser source with a relatively short coherence length can be used; and the compensating interferometer can be located near the signal processing electronics, far away from the sensing interferometer and noise introduced by reference arm can be greatly reduced. The performance of the hydrophone is evaluated experimentally by immersing the sensing interferometer in a water tank to detect underwater acoustic signals generated by an acoustic wave projector. Experimental results show that over the frequency range of 1 to 4 kHz, the hydrophone has an almost flat response with an average normalized sensitivity of -302 dB re 1/ μ Pa.