High Performance Resonator Fiber Optic Gyro Made of Air Core Fiber

Agiltron proposes an innovative resonant fiber optic gyro (RFOG) based on air-core optical fiber achieving high performance, compact size, lightweight and low fabrication cost. The proposed gyro uniquely combines the advantages of high finesse of a ring laser gyro (RLG) and the advantages of long optical path and miniature package of interferometer fiber optic gyro (IFOG). Critically, the utilization of air-core fiber dramatically reduces the undesirable nonlinear effects inducing long term drift and short term noise in silica fiber caused by the Kerr effect, Faraday effect, and Rayleigh backscattering by a factor of up to 500, and the Shupe thermal effect by factor 3 to 10 due to the light propagating inside of air core rather than silica. Moreover, the RFOG can provide high sensitivity with short fiber length and use a closed loop configuration and narrow bandwidth laser to detect the frequency shift, resulting in smaller drift and high signal to noise ratio. Phase I will identify the critical technology challenges, synthesize advanced architectures, perform concept feasibility analysis, build the basic resonator module, and define the Phase II approach.