Distributed fiber sensors based on forward stimulated Brillouin scattering (F-SBS) have attracted special attention because of their capability to detect the acoustic impedance of liquid material outside fiber. However, the reported results were based on the extraction of a 1st-order local spectrum, causing the sensing distance to be restricted by pump depletion. Here, a novel post-processing technique was proposed for distributed acoustic impedance sensing by extracting the 2nd-order local spectrum, which is beneficial for improving the sensing signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) significantly, since its pulse energy penetrates into the fiber more deeply. As a proof-of-concept, distributed acoustic impedance sensing along ∼ 1630 m fiber under moderate spatial resolution of ∼ 20 m was demonstrated.

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A distributed Brillouin optical time-domain analysis (BOTDA) sensor enhanced by forward stimulated Brillouin scattering (FSBS) based distributed Brillouin amplification (DBA) was proposed and presented. Due to co-propagating of pump and Stokes lights, the Stokes pulse is effectively amplified in front segment of fiber, resulting in flatter gain distribution. As a proof-of-concept, FSBS-DBA based BOTDA sensing with distance of ∼74.2 km, Brillouin frequency shift standard deviation of less than ∼2 MHz and spatial resolution of ∼10 m was demonstrated. This method is compatible and complementary with backward SBS-based DBA, and features better pumping efficiency than Raman amplification.

We demonstrated a structure for extending repeater-less sensing distance of Brillouin optical time-domain analysis enhanced by distributed Brillouin amplification (DBA-BOTDA) through a combination with the Brillouin phase spectrum (BPS), where parallel demodulation of the frequency-comb pump can be realized. The careful structure design is implemented to perfectly suppress the impacts of various phase noises on long-distance BPS extraction. ∼98.9 km sensing distance and ∼6.5 m spatial resolution were demonstrated, with only four times frequency sweeping. The standard deviation of Brillouin frequency shift can be decreased to within ∼2 MHz by a combination of Brillouin gain spectrum and BPS.

Brillouin optical time-domain analysis (BOTDA) using distributed Brillouin amplification (DBA) only requires a milliwatt-level pump to achieve a sensing range beyond 100 km, which provides a powerful tool for temperature/strain sensing. However, similar to the majority of other long-range BOTDAs, the state-of-the-art reports require > 1000 times average, severely restricting the sensing speed. The blind area over tens of kilometers caused by the nonuniform Brillouin response and parasitic amplitude modulation (AM) are crucial factors affecting the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Here, a comprehensive performance optimization and substantial enhancement for BOTDA sensors was presented by the direct demodulation of an injection-locked dual-bandwidth probe wave. Injection locking (IL) can completely eliminate the impact of AM noise; dual-bandwidth probe enables self-adaptive pulse loss compensation, thereby intensifying the SNR flatness along the ultralong fiber, and direct probe demodulation can overcome nonlocal effects and allows ∼19.7 dB enhancement of probe input power. Therefore, using only 100 times average, ∼148.3 km sensing, and ∼5 m spatial resolution were achieved with < ∼0.8 MHz standard deviation of Brillouin frequency shift (BFS) over a broad range (∼131.7 km). The reduction in averages was more than 10 times that of the reported majority of long-range BOTDAs. Such performances were achieved without using time-consuming or post-processing techniques, such as optical pulse coding and image denoising. Because this approach is compatible with optical chirp chain technique without frequency sweeping, fast acquisition (0.3 s) was also realized, which has the potential for fast sensing at 3.3 Hz along a ∼150 km fiber.