Performances of Radiation-Hardened Single-Ended Raman Distributed Temperature Sensors Using Commercially Available Fibers

Abstract

Among all the distributed optical fiber temperature sensors, the Raman-based one that is intrinsically unaffected by the evolution of applied strain on the sensitive fiber. The radiation vulnerability of a classical single-ended Raman distributed temperature sensor (RDTS), even using a radiation-resistant fiber, is strongly degraded, leading to unacceptable levels of measurement errors. Double-ended RDTSs (DE-RDTS) allow mitigating most of the measurement errors but could be more largely impacted by the radiation-induced attenuation (RIA) in terms of accessible sensing length. A radiation-hardened architecture of single-ended RDTS was developed to overcome this problem. Here, we investigate the radiation performances of such an RDTS by combining it with commercial fibers of different compositions. Its potential to monitor temperature in various harsh environments mixing temperature and radiation constraints is discussed.