Time domain

Optics

Physics

Engineering

Distributed acoustic sensing

Optical time-domain reflectometer

Optical fiber

Fiber optic sensor

Electronic engineering

Acoustics

Bandwidth (computing)

Reflectometry

Computer vision

Computer science

Polarization-maintaining optical fiber

Rayleigh scattering

Telecommunications

IEEE Internet of Things Journal

Phase-sensitive optical time-domain reflectometry (Φ-OTDR), which utilizes the phase information of Rayleigh scattered lightwave inside optical fiber, could turn a fiber cable into a massive sensor array for distributed acoustic sensing (DAS), i.e., an emerging infrastructure for Internet of Things. Given a certain fiber length, there are tradeoffs among the sensing bandwidth, the sensitivity, and the spatial resolution. In this paper, the concept of linearization and Golay pulse-coding for heterodyne Φ-OTDR are proposed and experimentally verified for the first time. First, we gave a full theoretical treatment on how an intensity-coded yet phase-retrieved Φ-OTDR can be built up as a fully linear system, therefore a significant enhancement of signal-to-noise ratio becomes viable and the sensing bandwidth equals the four-times averaging case. Second in the proof-of-concept experiment, submeter gauge length and nanostrain resolution were realized with 10 km sensing range, in other words, more than ten thousand sensitive sensing units were realized along the fiber. This paper makes a significant step toward high-performance DAS with orders-of-magnitude performance enhancement.

Distributed Acoustic Sensing Based on Pulse-Coding Phase-Sensitive OTDR