High-Performance Distributed Brillouin Optical Fiber Sensing

Abstract

This paper reviews the recent advances on the high-performance distributed Brillouin optical fiber sensing, which include the conventional distributed Brillouin optical fiber sensing based on backward stimulated Brillouin scattering and two other novel distributed sensing mechanisms based on Brillouin dynamic grating and forward stimulated Brillouin scattering, respectively. As for the conventional distributed Brillouin optical fiber sensing, the spatial resolution has been improved from meter to centimeter in the time-domain scheme and to millimeter in the correlation-domain scheme, respectively; the measurement time has been reduced from minute to millisecond and even to microsecond; the sensing range has reached more than 100 km. Brillouin dynamic grating can be used to measure the birefringence of a polarization-maintaining fiber, which has been explored to realize distributed measurement of temperature, strain, salinity, static pressure, and transverse pressure. More recently, forward stimulated Brillouin scattering has gained considerable interest because of its capacity to detect mechanical features of materials surrounding the optical fiber, and remarkable works using ingenious schemes have managed to realize distributed measurement, which opens a brand-new way to achieve position-resolved substance identification.

Distributed optical fiber fusion sensing system based on dual light source and pulse precision delay technology

“…When the pump light is injected into the fiber, it is diffracted by the "grating" to produce the scattered light from the abyss. The propagated incident light interacts with the moving acoustic light grating, and its frequency shifts B v due to the Doppler effect, as shown in the following equation [5][6] .…”

Microwave photonics applications of stimulated Brillouin scattering

“…SBS is one of the strongest non-linear optical processes. Extensive control over the SBS parameters makes it desirable in a wide range of applications such as signal processing [13,14,42,[75][76][77][78], sensors [79][80][81][82], Brillouin dynamic grating [83][84][85][86], frequency measurements [87][88][89][90] and slow-light [91][92][93]. Frequencies ranging from 300 MHz to 300 GHz in the electromagnetic spectrum are generally termed as microwave.…”

Active Optical Signal Conditioning and Monitoring System

“…Among the various optical systems, optical sensing systems have become significantly viable and are prominently being developed with specialty waveguides and processed waveguides [12][13][14][15][16][17][18] . Although the functionalities of optical sensing systems are worthwhile in terms of sensitivity, range of operation, reconfigurability, and various parameter monitoring, yet their performance is influenced by measurand field uniformity and external disturbances.…”