A distributed optical fiber sensing system for synchronous vibration and loss measurement

Abstract:

We propose a fully distributed fusion system combining phase-sensitive optical time-domain reflectometry (Φ-OTDR) and OTDR for synchronous vibration and loss measurement by setting an ingenious frequency sweep rate (FSR) of the optical source. The relationships between FSR, probe pulse width and repeat period are given to balance the amplitude fluctuation of OTDR traces, the dead zone probability and the measurable frequency range of vibration events. In the experiment, we achieve synchronous vibration and loss measurement with FSR of 40 MHz/s, the proble pulse width of 100 ns and repeat rate of 0.4 ms. The fluctuation of OTDR trace is less than 0.45 dB when the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is over 12 dB for a captured vibration event located at 9.1 km. The proposed method can be used for not only detection but also early warning of damage events in optical communication networks.