Wind ranging and velocimetry with low peak power and long-duration modulated laser

Coherent Doppler LIDAR with long-duration frequency-modulated pulses for wind sensing

A coherent Doppler LIDAR (CDL) with long-duration frequency-modulated pulses was demonstrated and validated by analyzing the data observed by a prototype. In traditional CDL using short-duration single-frequency pulses (PCDL; pulsed CDL), there exists a trade-off relationship between distance and velocity resolution. Meanwhile, in earlier work, a theoretical framework of CDL using long-duration frequency-modulated pulses (FMCDL; frequency-modulated CDL) was put forth to eliminate the trade-off. We developed the prototype to be operated as both a PCDL and FMCDL. Analyses of data observed by the PCDL and FMCDL modes showed that the FMCDL worked in good agreement with the PCDL for wind ranging and velocimetry. Furthermore, the performance of the FMCDL in terms of received power and resolution of distance and velocity was quantitatively consistent with ones theoretically expected.

A Traceable High-Accuracy Velocity Measurement by Electro-Optic Dual-Comb Interferometry

An electro-optic dual-comb Doppler velocimeter for high-accuracy velocity measurement is presented in this paper. The velocity information of the object can be accurately extracted from the change of repetition frequency, which is in the microwave frequency domain and can be locked to an atomic clock. We generate two optical combs by electro-optic phase modulators and trace their repetition frequencies to the rubidium clock. One functions as the measurement laser and the other the reference. Experimentally, we verify its high accuracy in the range of 100–300 mm/s with a maximum deviation of 0.44 mm/s. The proposed velocimeter combines the merits of high accuracy and wide range. In addition, since the repetition frequency used for the measurement is traceable to the rubidium clock, its potential superiority in traceability can be utilized in velocity metrology.

High-performance optical coherence velocimeter: theory and applications

We proposed a high-performance optical coherence velocimeter (OCV) based on broadband optical interference which achieves spatial resolution from interference cancellation or enhancement of different components of the broadband light. There is a challengeable issue for OCV that the interference fringes become blurred when the velocity of detected object is relatively large, hindering the pace of OCV application in high-velocity field. To resolve this, the relationship between blurry coefficient and OCV system parameters (e.g., exposure time, central wavelength, bandwidth of source) was derived. It was found that blurry coefficient changed with oscillatory decay form and reached the minimum at each order blurry velocity. It showed that maximum measurable velocity of OCV systems could reach 10th order blurry velocity. The measurement of vibration of the loudspeaker driven by a function signal generator was employed to experimentally verify the velocity measurement performance of the system. The experiment demonstrated that the developed OCV can provide large velocity measurement ranges from static to 25.2 mm/s with nanometer-level precision and maximum measurable vibration frequency of up to 50 kHz. However, in theory, the theoretical maximum measurable velocity can be up to 1.06 m/s for current OCV configuration. The OCV has high precision, large dynamic range, and high-velocity measurement capability, making it attractive for applications in mechanical structure vibration monitoring and acoustic measurement.