A novel architecture of fibre-optic interferometric hydrophone

The fibre-optic interferometric hydrophone has been widely used in ocean acoustic applications. There are many different hydrophone systems in use. They can generally be classified as hull mounted, towed, or fixed (bottom mounted and vertical) array systems. Different optical architectures have evolved for each of the areas, which make a good case study on what aspects of a particular application influence the optical architecture. A novel architecture of fibre-optic hydrophone based on PMDI is theoretically and experimentally discussed in this paper. A novel optical configuration is proposed, and the modulation and demodulation system is built. A series of experiments are designed to analyse the characteristics of this system. The results of the experiments show that this type of fibre-optic interferometric hydrophone array has many advantages such as low noise, a large dynamic range.