150 km fast BOTDA based on the optical chirp chain probe wave and Brillouin loss scheme

Abstract

Distributed long-range Brillouin optical time domain analysis (BOTDA) is an extremely time-consuming sensing scheme, which requires frequency mapping of the Brillouin spectrum and a large number of average times. Here, we propose a fast long-range BOTDA based on the optical chirp chain (OCC) probe wave and Brillouin loss scheme. The OCC-modulated probe wave is enabled by cascading fast-frequency-changing microwave chirp segments head-to-tail, which covers a large frequency range around the anti-Stokes frequency relative to the pump wave. The combination of the OCC technique and Brillouin loss scheme provides several advantages, i.e., fast measurement, a high Brillouin threshold, no additional amplification scheme, and freedom from the nonlocal effect. In the experiment, 6 m spatial resolution, 3.2 s measurement time, and 3 MHz measurement precision were achieved over a 150 km single-mode fiber.