108-km Distributed Acoustic Sensor With 220-p$\varepsilon /\surd$Hz Strain Resolution and 5-m Spatial Resolution

Abstract

The measurement distance is one of the most important parameters for distributed acoustic sensor (DAS). In this paper, we report a long-distance and high-sensitivity DAS system based on time-gated digital optical frequency domain reflectometry. The bi-directional distributed Raman amplification is adopted to realize long measurement distance. The shape of optical pulse is pre-distorted to be a standard Hanning window, which provides a theoretical peak-side lobe ratio of 46 dB to suppress the crosstalk. The interference fading and polarization fading are well suppressed, and hence phase-demodulation method is adopted, instead of intensity demodulation method. As a result, the sensitivity is enhanced and the full information (amplitude, phase, and frequency) of the vibration can be obtained. In experiments, the fiber length is about 108 km, whereas the spatial resolution is 5 m. A weak vibration with peak-peak amplitude of 14.7 nε is correctly located at the distance of 98 km with a high SNR of 30 dB. It is the first time that 220-pε/√Hz strain sensitivity is realized over 100-km-level fiber and the vibration waveform is retrieved linearly without harmonics.