IEEE PHOTONICS TECHNOLOGY LETTERS, VOL. 28, NO. 7, APRIL 1, 2016 771
40-km OFDR-Based Distributed Disturbance
Optical Fiber Sensor
Tiegen Liu, Yang Du, Zhenyang Ding, Kun Liu, Yonghan Zhou, and Junfeng Jiang
Abstract—We present a 40-km distributed disturbance optical
fiber sensor based on optical frequency domain reflectometry.
Using the local Rayleigh backscattering in the optical frequency
domain after deskew filter processing, we can extract the position
and level information of the disturbance by the cross-correlation
analysis of the signals between the disturbed and nondisturbed
states. We also realize the location of two simultaneous distur-
bances in the test fiber.
Index Terms— Optical fibers, optical scattering, frequency
domain analysis, reflectometry.
I. INTRODUCTION
D
ISTRIBUTED disturbance optical fiber sen-
sors (DDOFS) attracted a lot of interests for different
applications in intrusion detection, oil/gas pipeline monitoring,
communication or electric cable monitoring and so on [1].
DDOFS falls into two categories by the main principle: one
is based on the interferometry and the other is based on
reflectometry.
The first kind of DDOFS is based on the interferometry.
This method has some advantages of low system complexity,
easy operation and long measurement range (up to 80 km).
The spatial resolution of locating a disturbance (sensing spatial
resolution) in this method is about several ten to hundred
meters [2]. However, the accuracy of locating a disturbance
is easily influenced by the polarization effects [3]. Even
worse, this method cannot locate simultaneous multi-points
disturbances.
The second kind of DDOFS is based on the reflectome-
try. The greatest advantage of this method comparing with
the interferometry method is that it can locate simultaneous
multi-points disturbances. There are two types in the second
method, including DDOFS based on optical time domain
Manuscript received July 30, 2015; revised November 29, 2015; accepted
December 29, 2015. Date of publication December 31, 2015; date of cur-
rent version February 25, 2016. This work was supported in part by the
National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 61505138, Grant
61475114, Grant 61108070, Grant 61227011, and Grant 61378043), in part
by the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation Grant 2015M580199, in part
by the National Basic Research Program of China (973 Program) under
Grant 2010CB327806 and Grant 2010CB327802, in part by the National
Instrumentation Program under Grant 2013YQ030915, in part by the Tianjin
Natural Science Foundation under Grant 13JCYBJC16200, in part by the
Science and Technology Key Project of Chinese Ministry of Education under
Grant 313038. (Tiegen Liu and Yang Du contributed equally to this work.)
(Corresponding author: Zhenyang Ding.)
The authors are with the College of Precision Instrument and Opto-
Electronics Engineering, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300072, China, and
also with the Key Laboratory of Opto-Electronics Information Technical,
Ministry of Education, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300072, China (e-mail:
zyding@tju.edu.cn).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this letter are available
online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LPT.2015.2513798
reflectometry (OTDR) and optical frequency domain reflec-
tometry (OFDR). In the OTDR-based DDOFS methods, the
best performing one is that Wang et al. [4] present a DDOFS
based on phase sensitive OTDR with hybrid distributed
amplification to achieve the detection of three simultaneous
disturbances with the measurement range of 175 km and the
spatial resolution of 25 m. However, the architecture of this
system is bidirectional, which is not very suitable for the line
structure monitoring such as pipeline and communication or
electric cable. In the OFDR-based DDOFS methods,
Arbel and Eyal [5] use a 10 km DDOFS based on
OFDR to achieve the detection of two simultaneous distur-
bances, but they don’t show the sensing spatial resolution.
Shiloh and Eyal [6] use a 20 km DDOFS based on OFDR with
fractional Fourier transform, but they only show the results of
one disturbance detection and also don’t give the value of
the sensing spatial resolution. Rayleigh backscattering (RB)
characteristic information measured by OFDR can be used
to achieve short range (several ten meters) distributed strain
measurements with high sensitivity and high spatial resolu-
tion [7]. Our previous work [8] achieves a DDOFS based on
the correlation analysis of RB characteristic information using
OFDR. This system can detect two simultaneous disturbances
in 12 km measurement range. Comparing with the OTDR
method [4], OFDR has lower system complexity and single
direction architecture. Moreover, OFDR-based DDOFS has a
great potential for a realization of better measurement range
and spatial resolution.
In this letter, we present a 40 km DDOFS based on the cor-
relation analysis of RB signals in deskew filter OFDR. In the
previous work [8], as the limitation of the path difference in the
auxiliary interferometer as an external clock, the measurement
range of the previous system is only 12 km. In the new
system, we use a deskew filter method [9], [10] to compensate
the nonlinear phase of a tunable laser source (TLS) after the
data acquisition. The measurement range is no longer limited
by the path difference in the auxiliary interferometer, thus
the measurement range is extended to 40 km. The position
and level information of the disturbances can be extracted
by the cross-correlation analysis of the signals between the
disturbed state and non-disturbed state of the local RB. In the
previous work [8], the local RB signals are in the spatial
domain, whereas, in the presented new method, the local
RB signals are in the optical frequency domain, which can
suppress the noise in the long measurement range. In addition,
we also achieve location of two simultaneous disturbances in
the test fiber. To authors’ best knowledge, this is the longest
measurement range ever achieved by using the OFDR-based
DDOFS.
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