Time-expanded phase-sensitive optical time-domain reflectometry
Published Date: 3/23/2021
Source: phys.org
Distributed optical fiber sensing (DOFS) is currently a mature technology that allows 'transforming' a conventional fiber optic into a continuous array of individual sensors, which are distributed along its length. Between the panoply of techniques developed in the field of DOFS, those based on phase-sensitive optical time-domain reflectometry (ΦOTDR) have gained a great deal of attention, mainly due to their ability to measure strain and temperature perturbations in real time. These unique features, along with other advantages of distributed sensors (reduced weight, electromagnetic immunity and small size) make ΦOTDR sensors an excellent solution for monitoring large infrastructures (like bridges and pipelines), especially when considering that their cost scales inversely to the number of sensing points, and its resolution can achieve a few meters.