Vehicle-mounted validations of a 1.55-μm all-fiber continuous-wave coherent laser radar for measuring aircraft airspeed

Abstract. The lidar velocimetry is an airspeed sensor for the application of the lidar remote sensing technology to airborne air data systems. This study discusses a 1.55-μm all-fiber continuous-wave coherent laser radar (CLR) system, with a balanced photodetector as receiving frequency discriminators, developed by the Ocean Remote Sensing Laboratory, Ocean University of China. The system exhibits advantages including a compact structure, light weight, and high precision. The coupling efficiency of light from free space to single-mode fiber is analyzed, and the optimal value of the relative aperture of the coupling lens is given (d  /  f  =  0.2107). The expression of carrier-to-noise ratio is simulated based on the parameters of the components used in the system to obtain the optimum local oscillator power (0.724 mW). The presented result of the hard target experiment and vehicle-mounted experiment in August 2018 indicates that the correlation coefficient between the lidar measured value and actual speed value is better than 0.99, relative error is less than 2.6%, and standard deviation is less than 0.22  m  /  s. The aforementioned validation results indicate that the CLR system exhibits stable and reliable performance and the potential to measure aircraft airspeed.

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