Abstract
As one of the most consolidated distributed fiber sensors based on stimulated Brillouin scattering, the Brillouin optical time-domain analyzer (BOTDA) has been developed for decades. Despite the commercial availability and outstanding progresses which has been achieved, the intrinsic Lorentzian gain spectrum restricts the sensing performance from possible further enhancements and hence limits the field of validity of the technique. In this paper, the novel method of engineering the gain spectral properties of the Brillouin scattering and its application on static and dynamic BOTDA sensors will be reviewed. Such a spectral property engineering has not only provided improvements to BOTDA, but also might open a new way to enhance the performance of all kinds of distributed Brillouin fiber sensors.
Highlights
Besides the significant impact on telecommunications, the optical fiber, as arguably one of the most important inventions in the last century, plays an important role in the field of sensing due to its easy embeddability, chemical inertia and immunity to electromagnetic interference
The focus of this paper is to review the specific benefits of gain spectrum engineering for sensing
It is anchored between a 2-dimensional micrometer stage and a shaker, which is driven by an audio signal generator and determines the longitudinal vibration amplitude and frequency
Summary
Besides the significant impact on telecommunications, the optical fiber, as arguably one of the most important inventions in the last century, plays an important role in the field of sensing due to its easy embeddability, chemical inertia and immunity to electromagnetic interference. For the most consolidated time-domain distributed Brillouin sensing technique, known as Brillouin optical time-domain analyzer (BOTDA), the pump wave is pulsed in the time domain to achieve the spatial resolved measurement, transferring energy to the probe wave according to the local Brillouin gain spectrum (BGS) [4]. Lorentzian shape [3], the limited SNR requires a large number of averagings Both of these disadvantages make the conventional BOTDA configuration ineligible for dynamic tasks, i.e., the sensing of fast changing environmental conditions. There are two main sensing metrics of this techniques, namely the slope and the linear range [27] The former one symbolizes the smallest detectable measurand change and is defined as the conversion factor between a BFS shift and the corresponding gain change.
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