A high-performance fiber optic interferometric hydrophone based on a push-pull mandrel structure, with high sensitivity and wide-frequency response, is designed and developed. Each arm of the Michelson interferometer is a fiber coil wrapped onto a separate but concentric thin elastic tube as the sensing arm to detect acoustic pressure wave. The fiber optic hydrophone is fabricated and examined experimentally, demonstrating its capacity to detect very low-frequency underwater acoustic pressure variation. The theoretical design is validated experimentally, with results showing that the push-pull fiber optic hydrophone has an average sensitivity of -134.39 dB re rad/ μPa within the frequency range of 1 Hz-2 kHz, which is 5.67 dB higher than that of the analogous one-sensing-arm fiber optic interferometric mandrel hydrophone that we made for comparison. The push-pull fiber optic hydrophone has a minimum detectable pressure (MDP) of 25.37 μPa/√{Hz} at 1 kHz, about 15 dB lower than the deep-sea state zero (DSS0) level. At 10 Hz, the MDP is ~1.71 mPa/ √{Hz}, which is nearly 7 dB lower than the acoustic ambient noise in the ocean at low frequency. The sensitivity and the MDP of the push-pull fiber optic hydrophone have been doubled and improved by about 20% at 1 kHz, respectively, compared to other state-of-the-art flat response fiber optic hydrophones.

For the implementation of an all fiber observation network for submarine seismic monitoring, a tri-component geophone based on Michelson interferometry is proposed and tested. A compliant cylinder-based sensor head is analyzed with finite element method and tested. The operation frequency ranges from 2 Hz to 150 Hz for acceleration detection, employing a phase generated carrier demodulation scheme, with a responsivity above 50 dB re rad/g for the whole frequency range. The transverse suppression ratio is about 30 dB. The system noise at low frequency originated mainly from the 1/f fluctuation, with an average system noise level −123.55 $\mathrm{dB}\mathrm{re}\mathrm{rad}/\sqrt{\mathrm{Hz}}$ ranging from 0 Hz to 500 Hz. The minimum detectable acceleration is about 2 $\mathrm{ng}/\sqrt{\mathrm{Hz}}$ , and the dynamic range is above 116 dB.

Terahertz (THz) time-domain spectroscopy (TDS) imaging is considered a nondestructive evaluation method for composite materials used for examining various defects of carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) composites and fire-retardant coatings in the reflective imaging modality. We demonstrate that hidden defects simulated by Teflon artificial inserts are imaged clearly in the perpendicular polarization mode. The THz TDS technique is also used to measure the thickness of thin fire-retardant coatings on CFRP composites with a typical accuracy of about 10 micrometers. In addition, coating debonding is successfully imaged based on the time-delay difference of the time-domain waveforms between closely adhered and debonded sample locations.

In recent years, our research group has been devoting substantial efforts to the research and development of active all-solid-state electronic terahertz (THz) continuous wave imaging systems for nondestructive testing, which is currently benefitting from the increasing amount of transmitting power, high performance/cost ratio and adaptability to engineering. In this paper, an in-house developed broadband linear frequency modulated continuous wave (LFMCW) three-dimensional (3D) THz imaging system is described, and two sets of experimental platforms are set up to assist the planning and completion of the research, including a narrow-band LFMCW 3D imaging radar and a wide-band stepped-frequency modulated continuous wave 3D imaging radar. For 3D imaging systems, to cope with demanding scenarios and to achieve excellent imaging performance, various reconstruction algorithms are explored. The first is a spectral refinement and correction approach based on fast Fourier transform and modern spectral estimation for accurate thickness measurement. The second is the synthetic aperture radar imaging algorithm for surface detection or internal detection of objects with lower refractive index. The third is a 3D reconstruction algorithm based on half space Green’s function and the exploding source model for the interior detection of materials with higher refractive index. The fourth is the frequency interference algorithm combining phase unwrapping to measure uneven and nonplanar surfaces. Exploiting these systems, along with the associated experimental platforms and reconstruction algorithms, we successfully implemented non-destructive testing for objects with various defects and of different materials, such as polymer boards with voids, and foam with inclusions.

Millimeter-wave imaging systems are increasingly used in human screening at checkpoints, in linear or multi-input multi-output (MIMO) array modes. Rather than pressing intrinsic system requirements to improve image quality, it seems more economical to appeal to some specific approaches, for example, super-resolution (SR) techniques. In this paper, as a variation of SR, coherence factor (CF) is incorporated in the framework of the range migration algorithm (RMA), termed CF-RMA for short. As a critical part of CF, the double integral in the wavenumber domain is approximated by a single integral in the sense of the point-matching method, resulting in a particular formulation to carry on another independent RMA program. Being computationally efficient, the proposed method is shown to be effective in suppressing sidelobes and background noise. The resolution (as gauged by the width of the main lobe of the point spread function) is enhanced as well. A structural similarity (SSIM) index is employed to quantify the image quality enhancement with respect to state-of-the-art SR approaches. In terms of computation load, the new approach is shown to be much more efficient than state-of-the-art SR approaches.