KEYWORDS: Ocean optics, Sensing systems, Modulation, Single mode fibers, Bismuth, Spatial resolution, Sensors, Signal to noise ratio, Temperature metrology, Acoustics
The BGS broadening caused by short pump pulse would degrade the SNR enhancement provided by the optical pulse coding and strongly reduce the measurement accuracy of coded BOTDA sensors, especially at long sensing ranges with sub-meter spatial resolution. In this work, to overcome this trade-off between spatial resolution and measurement accuracy, we implement a BOTDA sensor employing pre-pumped Golay coding with optimized pre-pumped pulse power. The proposed scheme fully exploits the SNR enhancement provided by the coding and the benefits from the preactivated acoustic field established by the pre-pumped pulse, achieving distributed temperature measurements with 70 cm spatial resolution and temperature resolution better than 1.5 °C throughout the 50 km sensing fiber.
KEYWORDS: Spatial resolution, Sensors, Signal to noise ratio, Sensing systems, Signal detection, Single mode fibers, Signal processing, Sun, Time metrology, Continuous wave operation
A Brillouin optical time-domain analysis (BOTDA) sensor that combines the conventional complementary coding with the pulse prepump technique for high-accuracy and long-range distributed sensing is implemented and analyzed. The employment of the complementary coding provides an enhanced signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the sensing system and an extended sensing distance, and the measurement time is also reduced compared with a BOTDA sensor using linear coding. The combination of pulse prepump technique enables the establishment of a preactivated acoustic field in each pump pulse of the complementary codeword, which ensures measurements of high spatial resolution and high frequency accuracy. The feasibility of the prepumped complementary coding is analyzed theoretically and experimentally. The experiments are carried out beyond 50-km single-mode fiber, and experimental results show the capabilities of the proposed scheme to achieve 1-m spatial resolution with temperature and strain resolutions equal to ∼1.6°C and ∼32 μϵ, and 2-m spatial resolution with temperature and strain resolutions equal to ∼0.3°C and ∼6 μϵ, respectively. A longer sensing distance with the same spatial resolution and measurement accuracy can be achieved through increasing the code length of the prepumped complementary code.
KEYWORDS: Sensing systems, Control systems, Electrooptic modulators, Signal to noise ratio, Modulation, Signal detection, Modulators, Signal processing, Continuous wave operation
In most distributed Brillouin sensing systems, it is crucial to keep the long-term stability of the electro-optic modulator (EOM) operating point. The dither-tone based bias control methods are widely adopted in this kind of systems for its robustness and reliability, but the low frequency dither tone (a few kilohertz) added into the dc bias port of the EOM may have a detrimental impact on the sensing performance of the Brillouin sensing system. Experimental results show that the dither frequency should not be set around quarter of the pulse repetition rate or its multiples, and the employed dither amplitude should be in the range of 0.003Vπ to 0.015Vπ (Vπ is the RF half-wave voltage of the EOM), in order to overcome the limitation of dither tone based bias control techniques in BOTDA systems. These results will provide guidelines to improve the performance of the Brillouin sensing systems using dither-based EOM bias control method.
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