Bandwidth-Enhanced Quasi-Distributed Acoustic Sensing With Interleaved Chirped Pulses

Abstract

In this letter, to break through the response bandwidth limit of quasi-distributed acoustic sensing system, a novel interleaved chirped pulses (ICP) approach is proposed on the basis of pulse compression ${\Phi }$ -OTDR with coherent detection. As shown in the theoretical analysis, for ultra-weak fiber Bragg grating (UWFBG) array with fixed positions and intervals, the space between any two FBGs can be used to multiplex probing pulses, without occupying extra detection bandwidth. The cross-correlation peak of probe pulses can be separated from each other in the time domain with matched filtering. By injecting probe pulses which are evenly interleaved as positive-chirped and negative-chirped, crosstalk of the cross-correlation peaks can be suppressed. In the proof-of-principle experiment, the response bandwidth is 3 times as that of the traditional single pulse probing scheme, all with the same detection bandwidth; 860 m sensing range with 166.4 kHz response bandwidth has been achieved, with 5 m spatial resolution and 1.8 p ${\varepsilon /\sqrt {Hz}}$ strain sensitivity.