High-Speed Mach-Zehnder-OTDR Distributed Optical Fiber Vibration Sensor Using Medium-Coherence Laser

Abstract This article presents a high-speed distributed vibration sensing based on Mach-Zehnder-OTDR (optical time-domain reflectometry). Ultra-weak fiber Bragg gratings (UWFBG), whose backward light intensity is 2-4 orders of magnitude higher than that of Rayleigh scattering, are used as the reflec...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Yuheng Tong, Zhengying Li, Jiaqi Wang, Honghai Wang, Haihu Yu
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: SpringerOpen 2018-06-01
Series:Photonic Sensors
Subjects:
Online Access:http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13320-018-0499-4
Description
Summary:Abstract This article presents a high-speed distributed vibration sensing based on Mach-Zehnder-OTDR (optical time-domain reflectometry). Ultra-weak fiber Bragg gratings (UWFBG), whose backward light intensity is 2-4 orders of magnitude higher than that of Rayleigh scattering, are used as the reflection markers. A medium-coherence laser can substitute conventional narrow bandwidth source to achieve an excellent performance of distributed vibration sensing since our unbalanced interferometer matches the interval of UWFBGs. The 3 m of spatial resolution of coherent detection and multiple simultaneous vibration sources locating can be realized based on OTDR. The enhanced signal to noise ratio (SNR) enables fast detection of distributed vibration without averaging. The fastest vibration of 25 kHz and the slowest vibration of 10 Hz can be detected with our system successfully, and the linearity is 0.9896 with a maximum deviation of 3.46 nƐ.
ISSN:1674-9251
2190-7439