JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 30, NO.

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Comb Filter-Based Fiber-Optic Methane Sensor System With Mitigation of Cross Gas Sensitivity
Duan Liu, Songnian Fu, Ming Tang, Senior Member, IEEE, Perry Shum, Senior Member, IEEE, and Deming Liu
AbstractA remote ber-optic methane gas sensor system is proposed and demonstrated with accurate gas concentration measurement and good mitigation of cross gas sensitivity. We use a polarization-maintaining photonic crystal ber (PM-PCF)-based Sagnac loop lter to slice the spectrum of a broadband light source so as to precisely match several absorption lines of the methane gas within the near-infrared band. Meanwhile, a compact and cost-effective gas cell with multiple reections is designed to enhance the interaction between the light beam and the methane gas to be detected, which also subsequently increase the system sensitivity. Due to the insensitive temperature dependence of the PM-PCF-based comb lter, we can obtain gas concentration ppm. Moreover, by measurement with a sensitivity of intentionally pumping the acetylene gas into the gas cell during the methane gas concentration measurement, the power variation caused by the interfering gas with 100% concentration is only equals to 0.7% of the power variation induced by the 100% concentration methane gas. Thus, effective mitigation of cross gas sensitivity is experimentally veried. The proposed ber-optic methane gas sensor system is veried with low cost, compact size, potential capability of multipoint detection, and high sensitivity. Index TermsComb lter, cross gas sensitivity, ber optical sensor, methane detection, photonic crystal ber.

I. INTRODUCTION NDERGROUND coal mine safety has been a major social and economic issue during past few years. Precaution measures in coal mine safety monitoring, pollution control, or industrial process control are becoming more and more crucial [1]. The major causes of those serious accidents include coal-bed gas outburst induced explosion, underground mine re, roof collapsing, and underground water ooding. Generally, underground coal-bed gas is composed of harmful
Manuscript received March 25, 2012; revised June 28, 2012; accepted July 25, 2012. Date of publication August 20, 2012; date of current version September 19, 2012. This work was jointly supported by the National Basic Research Program of China (2010CB328302), National Natural Science Foundation of China (61007044 and 60937002), Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (HUST 2011TS008), Natural Science Foundation of Hubei Province (2009CDA129), and China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (20090451044 and 201104466). D. Liu, S. Fu, M. Tang, and D. Liu are with the National Engineering Laboratory of Next Generation Internet Access Networks and the School of Optical and Electronic Information, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China (e-mail: duanliu@mail.hust.edu.cn; songnian@mail. hust.edu.cn; tangming@mail.hust.edu.cn; dmliu@mail.hust.edu.cn). P. Shum is with the Wuhan National Laboratory of Optoelectronics, and School of Optical and Electronic Information, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China, and also with the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, 637798 Singapore (e-mail: perry@lightwavetech.org). Color versions of one or more of the gures in this paper are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. Digital Object Identier 10.1109/JLT.2012.2211073

gases, particular methane gas and other gases such as heavy hydrocarbons, hydrogen, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen. Methane gas is not toxic. However, it is extremely ammable and may form explosive mixtures with air. It is veried that, when the methane gas is exposed into the atmosphere, the lower explosive limit of methane gas concentration is 4.45% and the upper explosive limit is 1517%. Thus, for the purpose of risk alarm, the detection resolution of the methane gas for underground %. High sensitivity and coal mine is normally around remote detection is extremely important for underground coal mines outburst prediction. With the development of ber-optic communication technique, ber-optic gas sensor becomes a promising alternative due to the unique advantages such as the inherent immunity to electromagnetic interference, the capability of fast, in situ, remote detection, safe in dangerous or hazardous environments, low cost, and compact size [2]. So far, many ber-optic gas sensor systems have been proposed and demonstrated [3][7]. Among those ber-optic gas sensors, the infrared (IR) absorption spectroscopy is the most promising one [3], [4], as it has many advantages including high sensitivity, gas selectivity, fast response time, robust to the environment disturbance, simple structure, and easily to form a sensor network by time-division multiplexing [5], wavelength-division multiplexing [6], or spatial division multiplexing scheme with an electrical controlled 1 optical switch [7], etc. Fiber-optic evanescent wave spectroscopy based on the attenuated total-internal-reection effect has also become a popular choice in IR absorbance spectroscopy schemes for the environment monitoring [8]. Though they can achieve fast measurement response, they suffered from low system sensitivity and poor mechanical stability. Fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs) were also introduced for ber-optic gas sensing applications [9]. However, packaging of those FBGs into the gas cell was quite challenging and it still suffered from mechanical vulnerability. Recently, photonic crystal bers (PCFs) were proposed as the gas cells as they can guide light over a long distance within either the cladding air holes [10] or the central air holes [11][14]. Moreover, FBGs fabricated in microstructured optical bers were also reported for gas sensing applications [15]. However, most of those experiments are still in the laboratory stage and are far from real implementation. On the other hand, with different lengths of optical path, sensor heads, and data-processing procedures, various optical gas sensors were reported with consequently different methane detection levels in [16][19]. Rather high detection levels were achieved in [16]100 ppb with the help of White multipass cell (base length 2 m and optical path length 80 m), in [17]0.3 ppm in laboratory system with low methane

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pressure, in [18]2 ppm in a 10 m cell, and in [19]55 ppb in laboratory system. It is worth noting that, most ber-optic methane sensors based on broadband light source (BLS) absorption spectroscopy are basically nonselective and they may produce false alarms under a domestic environment. In order to mitigate cross gas sensitivity, the laser diode (LD)-based absorption spectroscopy are commonly used for methane gas concentration measurement. However, environmental spectral uctuations demand the implementation of active wavelength-locking schemes in order to ensure the stability necessary and to provide proper gas selectivity. Moreover, those LD-based ber-optic gas sensors have disadvantages in that they are gas specic, with limited tuning capabilities, and too expensive when using LDs with a typical spectral width less than 1 MHz. Although BLS-based methane gas detection system is theoretically found to be approximately 40 times weaker than those using a narrow-linewidth LD anchored on the absorption line at 1665 nm, the effective absorption coefcient of BLS-based ber-optic methane sensors can be improved with much lower cost and easy implementation through spectrum splicing technique [20]. In this paper, we propose and experimentally demonstrate a ber-optic methane gas sensor system with an enhanced sensitivity based on a matched comb lter and novel gas cell design. The comb lter, consisted of a section of polarization maintaining (PM)-PCF, is designed to match a few absorption lines of methane gas within the 1650 nm band. Moreover, a novel gas cell with many good merits such as improved reliability, easy maintenance, high efciency, and compact size is realized. Due to the temperature insensitiveness of the PM-PCF-based comb lter, we can experimentally achieve precise methane concentration measurement with the proposed ber-optic gas sensor. After performing the methane gas concentration measurement, it is found that both the stability and cross gas sensitivity are well resolved. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section II describes the design and implementation of the PCFbased comb lter capable of matching several absorption lines in the 1650 nm band. Section III describes the design of a compact and reliable gas cell. The ber-optic gas sensor system with enhanced sensitivity and mitigation of interfering g gas is experimentally demonstrated in Section IV. The conclusions are summarized in Section V. II. MATCHED COMB FILTER Most gasses to be monitored have absorption lines within the low-loss transmission window of silica ber [21]. Fiber-optic gas sensors for the air pollution, noxious, explosive gas monitoring are mostly based on monitoring the optical power attenuation induced by the gas molecules absorption. When the input light passes through the gas under test, a portion of light is absorbed by the gas and another portion is scattered by the gas. And this can be described by the BeerLambert Law: (1) where is the output optical power when the methane gas concentration is zero, is the optical power of the light passing through the gas, is the gas concentration, is the length of

the gas cell, and is the absorption coefcient of the gas at frequency ( : ranging from 0.035 to 0.3 cm in the 1650 nm band). The absorption coefcient can be rewritten as [22] (2) (3) (4) where is the molecule absorption line intensity, is the normalized linear function, is the total particle number per unit pressure per unit volume, is the wave number of the central absorption frequency, is the collision spread coefcient, is the pressure spread coefcient, is the air pressure of the gas cell when the methane gas concentration is zero, is the environmental temperature, and is the temperature coefcient (here n is approximately 0.5). At the standard atmosphere and room temperature condition, we have (mol cm ). (5) From (1)(5), in case the gas cell length and the gas absorption coefcient are determined, the gas concentration can be estimated by measuring the ratio between and . When we choose a BLS to cover the whole absorption lines, the gas concentration can be well determined. However, cross gas sensitivity is an issue for different types of methane gas sensors, because there exist lots of other gas absorption lines within the operation wavelength range of the BLS. Thus, we need to slice the spectrum of the BLS according to a specic gas to be detected. Therefore, it is desirable to have a light source with a predened selectivity within the operation spectrum to match the gas absorption lines. Second, current research for ber-optic gas sensors concentrated at the near-IR band because of the availability of suitable semiconductor devices operating in this wavelength region. The most commonly used BLS in current methane gas detection systems has a typical spectral width of 20100 nm. However, the absorption line of methane gas with a 3 dB linewidth of pm, is much less than this, which results in a very small optical power variation even for relative large gas concentrations. Some ber-optic methane sensors have been demonstrated using a BLS and a lter with its transmission peaks matched to the absorption lines of the methane gas at either 1.33 m with an FBG [23], or 1.64 m [2], [24] with a sinusoidal signal modulated FabryProt cavity as a comb lter. But the traditional lter suffered a lot from the environmental changes, especially the temperature variations. Here, we propose a temperature-insensitive comb lter using a PM-PCF based Sagnac loop lter to slice the BLSs optical spectrum, and subsequently match multiple absorption lines of the methane gas. As a result, the dynamic range of the power variation for the proposed ber-optic gas sensor is substantially enhanced. A polarization-maintaining ber (PMF)-based Sagnac loop interferometer has some favorable characteristics such as low insertion loss, polarization independence to the input light, and useful broad spectral bandwidth [25]. These unique characteristics make it a promising wavelength-selective comb lter for

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sensing applications [26]. Nevertheless, the PMF is inuenced by the environmental changes such as temperature, which results in a slow drift of the peak transmission wavelengths. Recently, PCF-based Sagnac lters were found to be extremely low sensitive to temperature variations, compared with those traditional PMF based Sagnac lters. For a Sagnac loop lter with 1 m PMF, one can expect a full period shift with a temperature drift of only C; while for a PM-PCF-based Sagnac loop lter, over the full temperature range (0200 C), the maximum peak shifts was less than 10% of the lter period [27]. Since the methane gas absorption lines have almost uniform wavelength spacing and are particularly insensitive to environmental perturbation [28], we can design a comb lter with a free spectral range equal to the wavelength spacing of the methane gas absorption lines, and match the transmission peaks to as many absorption lines as possible. The proposed Sagnac loop interferometer is made up of a single-mode 50:50 ber coupler, operating in 1650 nm band, and a segment of PM-PCF. The transfer matrix of the comb lter can be calculated as (6) where is the optical power transmission coefcient, is the length of PM-PCF, is the center wavelength of the light source, and is the birefringence of the PM-PCF. The wavelength spacing of the peaks , is inversely proportional to the length , and birefringence of PMF : (7) A typical methane gas absorption spectrum is measured using a superluminescent diode (SLED) BLS (Denselight, DL-CS65M5A) by an optical spectrum analyzer with a resolution of 0.06 nm, as shown in Fig. 1. The wavelength spacing among multiple methane gas absorption lines is nm. Based on (7), we can calculate the length of the PM-PCF needed to match several absorption lines. One can see that by properly choosing the PMF length and birefringence, a ber Sagnac loop lter with multiple transmission peaks exactly matching the methane absorption lines around 1650 nm band is possible. In our design, we choose two specic absorption lines (1645.2 and 1642.6 nm) as the best matched wavelengths. The PM-PCF from Blaze photonics (PM-1550-01) used here has a beat length of 4 mm@1550 nm, and a loss of less than 1.5 dB/km. Thus, 2 m long PM-PCF is enough to match such two absorption lines very well. The insertion loss of the proposed comb lter is around 4 dB. Fig. 2 shows that the calculated transmission spectrum of the comb lter matches very well with most of the absorption lines within the 16351665 nm wavelength range. Hence, the comb lters low sensitivity to the temperature variation makes it vigorous to the environmental changes. Furthermore, the more absorption lines are matched by the comb lter, the more sensitive the sensor will be due to the removal of background light. Considering the uniform wavelength spacing of the methane absorption lines at the near-IR band, we can only match most absorption lines within this wavelength region but sacrice the maximum absorption wavelength at 1665 nm in our design. Note that

Fig. 1. Measured absorption lines of the methane gas characterized by a 1650 nm SLED.

Fig. 2. Calculated Sagnac loop lter spectrum and the corresponding methane gas absorption lines.

our conguration of comb lter can also be applied to monitor other gases after varying the length of PM-PCF according to the wavelength spacing of a specic gas absorption lines. III. GAS CELL IMPLEMENTATION From (1), we can see that the variation of the detected optical power after gas absorption is proportional to the length of the gas cell and the gas concentration. In order to enhance the minimal detectable gas concentration, the most straightforward way is to use a gas cell with a long interactive cavity length. However, there is a tradeoff between the real implementation and the measurement accuracy for the gas sensor system. An alternative solution is to guide the light beam traveling multiple times within one single compact gas cell cavity. For the gas cell, basically, there are two types: transmission gas cells and reection gas cells. In order to achieve gas concentration measurement with high sensitivity, the transmission gas cell are always cascaded for longer interaction length, as the received optical power variation are much larger for a longer gas cell. However, this will make the gas cell complex, bulky, and only suitable for the laboratory applications. Moreover, in order to make this sensor system practical, the gas cell must be dust-proof, moisture-proof, and indestructible. Thus, the out layer of the proposed gas cell was made of stainless steel. Around the corner of the gas cell, dust-proof, and moisture-proof material was wrapped to make the gas cell air proof. Inside the cell, we used a

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Fig. 3. Schematic diagram and prototype of the multiple reection cavity design of the gas cell.

Fig. 4. Schematic diagram of the proposed methane gas sensor system. APC: automatic power control, TEC: thermoelectric cooler.

pair of gradient-index lens optical ber collimators and a pair of at-bottomed glasses coated with high reection lm on the side face (the ber collimators are set at an angle of 3 to the tilted side of the glasses) to form the sensor head. The light from the comb lters output port was guided by the two ber collimators and reected a number of times (in our case, 15 times) between the two glasses. The gas under test interacted with the input light in between the two glass blocks. And the length between those two glass blocks is 2 cm long. The two ber collimators were xed on the V-grooves in the tilted slop of the glasses, as shown in Fig. 3. The effective optical length of the sensor head is now 30 cm after 15 times reections within the gas cell, and the insertion loss of such gas cell is dB. Our gas cell design has many advantages such as low insertion loss, compact size, and easy maintenance. Since temperature stability of gas cell is important to minimize measurement error and reduce false alarms, here we theoretically evaluate the thermal stability of the proposed gas cell. The glass block used here has a thermal expansion coefcient of K , while the unit metal material has a thermal expansion coefcient of K . When the environmental temperature changes 1 C, the thermally induced gas cell expansion is m. Based on (5), the concentration measurement error due to thermally induced light-path change is calculated to be approximately 1.67% for a temperature variation from 10 C to 45 C.

Fig. 5. Prototype of the proposed ber-optic methane gas sensor system.

IV. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS AND DISCUSSION The schematic diagram of the experimental setup is shown in Fig. 4. The light from another SLED (Photonik BLS-1590/ SLED/200) was rst sliced by a PM-PCF-based comb lter, and then split into two parts by a 3 dB ber coupler, referred as the signal light and the reference light, respectively. The signal light was subsequently introduced into the gas cell to interact with the methane gas and then complete the optic-to-electrical conversion by a p-i-n photodetector (PD), while the reference light was directly sent to another PD for the purpose of differential detection. As a result, the power uctuation of the SLED is solved by differential detection technique. The two PDs used here were HTOEs FC photodiode (HITECH PIN7-10-12) with a response wavelength range of 0.51.7 m and a responsibility of 0.8 A/W @1550 nm. Since the optical spectrum of the comb lter has matched at least six absorption lines of methane gas in our scheme, the signal light was effectively absorbed by the

gas under test. Hence, at the receiver end, the optical intensities of the two light beams were different. Then the electric signals were converted into digital signal after two analog-to-digital converter modules, and processed by a digital signal processing module to calculate and display the concentration of the methane gas. As shown in Fig. 5, the proposed methane gas sensor system mainly has three parts: the host machine with all signal processing functions, the gas cell, and the alarm device. Optical ber cable was used to link the host machine and the remote gas cell. The length of the ber cable was scalable, while the host machine was put in the supervision room for the purposed of remote monitoring. The proposed sensor system has been applied to measure different concentrations of methane gas, contained in several gas bottles. The SLEDs bias current was xed at 300 mA, and its output power was mW, and 3 km single-mode ber cable was used to communicate between the supervision room and the sensor head. An alarm device was also equipped when the concentration of methane reaches the dangerous explosive level. All the equipment of the proposed system is located at the supervision room except for the sensor head within a gas cell, so that it can keep the electronic device far away from the coal mine. We use our ber-optic methane sensor to measure the gas concentration and do a comparison with that of commercial IR sensor (Dynament TDS0034) for the purpose of calibration. The IR methane gas sensor has a measurement sensitivity of 100 ppm for a methane gas concentration of 010%. Fig. 6 shows the comparison of the standard gas concentration and measured results. It can be clearly observed that the measured results agree

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Fig. 7. Cross gas selectivity results of the proposed methane gas sensor system. Fig. 6. Measurement results of the proposed methane gas sensor system under different methane gas concentration.

well with the standard results calibrated by the IR sensor. As the two PDs both have a minimal voltage value of 1 mV due to the variation of the output optical power, the proposed ber-optic methane sensor system has a sensitivity of ppm. Meanwhile, the ratio between the signal and reference light induced voltage has a standard deviation of ; thus, this will cause a gas concentration measurement error of %. Then, we characterize the advantage owing to the matched comb lter. Without the comb lter, when the concentration of methane gas is 100%, only 0.21 V dynamic changes of output voltage can be obtained. After using the designed comb lter, the output power varies 0.33 V, when measuring the same concentration of methane gas. Thus, we can easily achieve 57% sensitivity improvement due to the removal of background light by using a matched comb lter. In particular, such sensitivity improvement keeps stable, with a temperature range of 10 C to 60 C, as a result of the insensitive temperature dependence of comb lter. In order to further verify our effective solution of cross gas sensitivity from the use of a BLS, we intentionally pump the acetylene gas into the gas cell during the concentration measurement of the methane gas. Since there are also some absorption lines of acetylene gas within such SLED spectrum, which has a typical 3 dB bandwidth of nm. Then, for the purpose of laboratory safety, we can treat the acetylene gas as a potential interfering gas for methane gas detection, and hence investigate the effectiveness of our proposed gas sensor in term of cross gas sensitivity. Finally, nitrogen gas is used as the emptying gas to pump the gas to be detected out of the gas cell, as it is nontoxic and has no evident absorption lines within such SLEDs spectrum. Since the pressure of nitrogen gas from the gas bottle is much higher than that in the gas cell, the instantaneous large absorption peaks clearly observed in the borderlines of the ve segments in Fig. 7, correspond to the large absorption induced by beam wander within the turbulent gas. It is found that the absorption coefcient changes due to the inhomogeneity of the mixed gas in the gas cell along with the pressure-induced fast variation of the gas concentration [29]. Thus, this instantaneous large absorption peaks can be treated as

the corresponding pumping or emptying moments. The whole monitoring curve can be divided into ve segments by those four peaks. The segment I shows the starting point of the measurement, when the SLED is connected after the system calibration. The output voltage is quite stable in the rst segment. And the segment II of the curve shows the introducing of the interfering gas, the acetylene gas, while at this segment 100% concentration of acetylene gas is inated into the gas cell. We can observe that no obvious power variation occurs. And the segment III shows the process of emptying the acetylene gas by pumping the nitrogen gas into the gas cell. The segment IV shows the process of pumping the 100% concentration of the methane gas into the gas cell, when we can observe a strong absorption line in Fig. 7. Around 0.33 V power variation can be observed due to the absorption of methane gas. The segment V shows the emptying process of the methane gas by pumping the nitrogen gas again, and ends the measurement. For the purpose of evaluation, we can use the peak-to-peak power variation as the criterion of the gas selectivity evaluation of the gas sensor. Then, the acetylene gas has a power variation of only 0.1%, while the measured methane-gas-induced power variation is 14%. Therefore, the 100% concentration acetylene-gas-induced signal variation equals to only 0.7% of the 100% concentration methane-gas-induced signal variation. We can conclude that the cross gas sensitivity is well resolved. The experimental results show the proposed gas sensors effectiveness in the mitigation of the cross gas sensitivity during methane gas concentration measurement. However, the interfering gas inuence is not totally removed, which is probably because, rst, additional optical lter is helpful to further attenuate the optical power beyond the absorption band and only take in the optical spectrum within the methane gas absorption peaks. Second, to thoroughly eliminate the acetylene gas inuence, initially, we need to use an extra LD with a lasing wavelength anchored at the acetylene gas absorption lines to monitor the acetylene gas concentration of the mixed gas in the gas cell. Then, the system source is switched to the BLS for the methane gas concentration measurement. As a result, the cross gas sensitivity can be well resolved in the electrical signal processing unit of the sensor system. This will increase the system complexity and cost; thus it is not considered.

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V. CONCLUSION We have proposed and experimentally demonstrated a beroptic methane gas sensor system with an enhanced sensitivity by using a matched comb lter and novel gas cell design. A comb lter, consisted of a section of PM-PCF, is designed to match a number of absorption lines of methane gas within the near-IR band, in case a low-cost SLED is used as system light source. As a result, success removal of background light and cross gas sensitivity can be experimentally achieved. Meanwhile, the gas cell in the proposed gas sensor adopts a novel multiple reection cavity structure, which is superior in some aspects such as improved reliability, easy maintenance, high efciency, and compact in size. After measurement, the proposed methane gas sensor has shown precise methane concentration measurement with an accuracy of ppm, due to the temperature insensitivity of the PM-PCF-based comb lter. After intentionally pumping the acetylene gas into the gas cell during the gas concentration measurement, the acetylene-gas-induced signal variation only equals to 0.7% of the methane-gas-induced signal variation. Thus, the cross gas sensitivity due to the use of BLS has been well solved. The proposed methane gas sensor system with a capability of low cost, compact size, potential capability of multipoint detection, and high sensitivity has successfully installed and operated under the coal mine condition. REFERENCES
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Duan Liu was born in Wuhan, Hubei, China, in 1978. He received the B.Eng. degree from the Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), Wuhan, China, in 2001, and the Ph.D. degree from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, in 2007. He then joined the Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics and the School of Optoelectronics Science and Engineering, HUST, in 2009. His research interests include ber lasers, ber Bragg gratings, and ber-optic sensors.

Songnian Fu received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from Xiamen University, Xiamen, China, in 1998 and 2001, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree from Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing, China, in 2004. From 2005 to 2010, he was at the Network Technology Research Center, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, as a Research Fellow. In February 2011, he jointed the Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics and the School of Optoelectronics Science and Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China, as Professor. His current research interests include all-optical signal processing, microwave photonic, and ber laser.

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Ming Tang (SM11) received the B.Eng. degree from the Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), Wuhan, China, in 2001, and the Ph.D. degree from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, in 2005. His postdoctoral research at the Network Technology Research Centre was focused on the optical ber ampliers, high-power ber lasers, nonlinear ber optics, and all-optical signal processing. In February 2009, he joined the Teraphotonics group led by Prof. H. Ito in RIKEN, Wako, Japan, as a Research Scientist conducting research on terahertz-wave generation, detection, and application using nonlinear optical technologies. Since March 2011, he has been a Professor in the School of Optoelectronics Science and Engineering, Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics, HUST. He has published more than 70 technical papers in the international recognized journals and conferences. Dr. Tang serves as the Regular Reviewer for the IEEE JOURNAL OF QUANTUM ELECTRONICS, the JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY, the IEEE PHOTONICS TECHNOLOGY LETTERS, and Optical Society of America publications. He has been a member of the Lasers and Electro-Optics Society (now IEEE Photonics Society) since 2001.

Deming Liu was born in Hubei Province, China. He received the Masters degree from the Chengdu Institute of Telecommunication (now University of Electronic Science and Technology of China), Chengdu, China, in 1984, and the Ph.D. degree from the Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), Wuhan, China, in 1999. He is currently a Professor at HUST. His recent research interests include optical access network, optical communication devices, and ber-optic sensors.

Perry Shum (SM05) received the B.Eng. and Ph.D. degrees in electronic and electrical engineering from the University of Birmingham, Birmingham, U.K., in 1991 and 1995, respectively. He was an Honorary Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the University of Birmingham. In 1996, he was involved in research of semiconductor laser and highspeed optical laser communication in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Hong Kong University, as a Visiting Research Fellow. In July 1997, he joined the Department of Electronic Engineering, Optoelectronics Research Centre, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong. In 1999, he joined the Network Technology Research Center, Nanyang Technology University, Singapore, and served successively as Assistant Professor, associate professor, Professor and the Director of the Research Center of Network Technology. In 2010, he joined the Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics, and School of Optoelectronics Science and Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China, as an Adjunct Professor. He has published more than 400 international journal and conference papers. His research interests include optical communications, nonlinear waveguide modeling, and ber-based technology. Dr. Shum received the Singapore National Academy of Science Young Scientist Award in 2002 for his contributions on next-generation optical communication technology.