Distributed Strain and Vibration Sensing System Based on Phase-Sensitive OTDR

Abstract

A system based on phase-sensitive optical time domain reflectometry is proposed for simultaneously strain and vibration sensing. The strain of fiber is detected by comparing the patterns of signal for different laser frequencies, and the vibration of fiber is detected simultaneously from the signals for any certain laser frequency. During the measurement, frequencies of the probe optical pulses are modulated sequentially in ascending or descending order. Using the signals generated by optical pulses with the same frequency, the vibration of fiber is detected with fast response speed; using that with different frequencies, the strain of fiber is detected with high resolution. In our experiment, a sensing system with 2-m spatial resolution, up to 1-kHz frequency measurement range and 10- <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\text{n}{{\varepsilon }}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> strain resolution is realized for a 9-km sensing fiber length.