Compensation of scale factor nonlinearity in resonator fiber optic gyro

Scale factor nonlinearity (SFN) and dynamic range (DR) are the two significant parameters used to evaluate the performance of a resonator fiber optic gyro (RFOG). The inherent SFN of an open-loop RFOG with triangular phase modulation is first analyzed theoretically, and its relationship with the DR is simulated, showing that the DR is significantly constrained by the SFN. For our system, when the SFN is 1%, the DR is less than +/- 82 deg/s. To decrease the SFN in a certain DR, a real-time compensation method based on a field-programmable gate array is proposed. The compensation model is set up and the compensation scheme is illustrated. With the proposed method, the SFN of the RFOG is decreased from 1.53% to 0.057% with a DR of +/- 100 deg/s. (c) 2014 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE)