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A large-aperture, seabed mounted, fiber-optic hydrophone array has been constructed and characterized. The system is designed for use as a large area surveillance array for deployment in shallow water regions. The underwater portion comprises two arrays of 48 hydrophones separated by a 3 km fiber-optic link, which are connected to a shore station by 40 km of single-mode optical fiber. The hydrophone is based on a fiber-optic Michelson interferometer and the acoustic transduction mechanism is a fiber-wrapped mandrel design. No electrical power is required in the underwater portion. The performance of the system is described, characterized during laboratory measurements and during a recent sea trial. Specifically, measurements of the acoustic resolution, array shape, beam patterns, array gain, and target tracking capability of this array. The system demonstrates self-noise levels up to 20 dB (typically 10 dB) lower than the ambient acoustic noise experienced in the sea trial and array gains close to the theoretical maximum. The system telemetry and electronics have been designed to be expandable to accommodate several hundred hydrophones.

We describe recent work to evaluate the potential performance of an interferometric fiber-optic microphone for battlefield acoustics. The microphone design has high sensitivity and flat response at low frequency and is readily multiplexed. The design is simple and could be manufactured at low cost, which is desirable since in operation the sensors may need to be disposable. Field trial results from an array of microphones are discussed.

In this paper, we will share the recent work that was done to understand how bulk flow rates and fluid composition may be derived in single-phase and multi-phase flow by tracking the slopes (velocities) of coherent features detected using Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS). Both laboratory experiments and real field examples will be presented to demonstrate how velocity features can be detected and attributed to events such as slug flow or sound waves. Speed of Sound (SoS) analysis can in principle be used for determining changes in the fluid composition in multiphase flows, which provides opportunities to detect fluid interfaces and water or gas breakthrough. On the other hand, slowly moving features such as slugs or turbulent eddies can be used to derive bulk flow velocities, which may be used for injection or production profiling. The evaluation method directly derives velocities by Fourier transforming the raw DAS data in the temporal and spatial domains without applying any calibration steps. It can therefore be used to monitor flow in wells on a drive-by or continuous basis without a need for reference flow data.