Long-distance distributed acoustic sensing utilizing negative frequency band.

Abstract

Wider bandwidth always means better overall performance for an information system. Naturally, this criterion can also be applied to phase-sensitive optical time domain reflectometry (Φ-OTDR), which is a typical distributed optical fiber sensing (DOFS) system. Thus, an indispensable way to enhance the performance of Φ-OTDR is to increase the available system bandwidth, which is usually limited by the electrical components. As a kind of frequency resources, the negative frequency band (NFB) has been used in communication systems based on coherent receivers and high-order modulation, but is still rarely used in DOFS. In this paper, we make a comprehensive study on how to utilize NFB in Φ-OTDR and thus double the available system bandwidth. Moreover, the related improvement of sensing performance is experimentally demonstrated. The positive and negative frequency multiplexing is utilized together with frequency division multiplexing to break the inherent trade-off between sensing distance and scan-rate. As a result, 21.6 kHz scan-rate is experimentally achieved on a 103 km fiber, with 97 pε/Hz strain resolution and 9.3 m spatial resolution. To the best of our knowledge, this is the best sensing performance in long distance Φ-OTDR > 100 km. The proposed scheme can also be applied to other DOFS systems with heterodyne-detection, opening up new possibilities for performance enhancement in DOFS systems.