Abstract
A thorough analysis of the key factors impacting on the performance of Brillouin distributed optical fiber sensors is presented. An analytical expression is derived to estimate the error on the determination of the Brillouin peak gain frequency, based for the first time on real experimental conditions. This expression is experimentally validated, and describes how this frequency uncertainty depends on measurement parameters, such as Brillouin gain linewidth, frequency scanning step and signal-to-noise ratio. Based on the model leading to this expression and considering the limitations imposed by nonlinear effects and pump depletion, a figure-of-merit is proposed to fairly compare the performance of Brillouin distributed sensing systems. This figure-of-merit offers to the research community and to potential users the possibility to evaluate with an objective metric the real performance gain resulting from any proposed configuration.
Highlights
During the past few years Brillouin-based distributed optical fiber sensing has been turning into one of the most vivid fields of research in optical fiber sensing, mainly due to its ability to provide distributed temperature and strain measurements along several tens of km of optical fiber with spatial resolution values down to the centimeter scale [1]
Based on a simple physical and statistical modeling, a novel expression to predict the uncertainty on the determination of the Brillouin frequency shift in Brillouin optical-time domain analysis (BOTDA) sensors has been established and validated by a rigorous experimental verification
Using this expression the actual accuracy on the determination of the Brillouin frequency shift can be confidently predicted from a single measurement of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in the sensor response at the receiver
Summary
During the past few years Brillouin-based distributed optical fiber sensing has been turning into one of the most vivid fields of research in optical fiber sensing, mainly due to its ability to provide distributed temperature and strain measurements along several tens of km of optical fiber with spatial resolution values down to the centimeter scale [1]. The distance range has been extended from some 30 km up to 150 km by using time-division multiplexing [11], frequency-division multiplexing [12], remote optical amplification [13,14,15,16,17,18], smart pump pulse coding techniques [19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26], or combination of these last two methods [27,28,29,30] It still remains uneasy for an external observer to fairly evaluate the real progresses reported in the abundance of recent publications. Any real progress offered by novel techniques should have the effect to normally make this FoM larger, so that the real performance improvement can be rigorously quantified
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