Continuous Fiber Bragg Grating Optical Sensors for Superconducting Magnet Quench Detection: The Effects of Attenuation and Position in the Array

Quasi-continuous arrays of fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs) show great promise for quench protection in superconductors. The number of identical gratings and the reflectivity of the individual gratings are important parameters determining the sensitivity of the system to a local temperature or strain perturbation. We apply strain to shift the Bragg wavelength of a single FBG through the spectrum of an array of up to 1000 identical gratings, and map out the detection sensitivity for a given
$\Delta \lambda$
relative to the peak reflectance of the FBG array, and show that the position of the perturbed FBG matters only due to the broadband attenuation of the probe light down the array. Varying the number of gratings in the array shows the interplay between the number of gratings, the reflectivity of the gratings, and the sensitivity of the system. We demonstrate that the ability to model the spectrum of the FBG array is crucial to predicting system performance.