Vibration-Induced Beat Frequency Offset Compensation in Distributed Acoustic Sensing Based on Optical Frequency Domain Reflectometry

Abstract

We investigate the impact of the frequency modulation induced by vibration occurring at a preceding distance in distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) based on optical frequency domain reflectometry (OFDR), which analyzes a vibration waveform by calculating the spectrum shift of Rayleigh backscattered light in the same manner as a fiber Bragg grating. When the measurement time of a beat signal is shorter than the period of the vibration at the preceding distance, the vibration-induced frequency modulation can be treated as a frequency offset for the backscattered light. The frequency offset becomes a distance offset through the distance - beat frequency allocation of OFDR, and the distance offset forces us to interrogate the Rayleigh backscattered light spectra at unintentional distances for each measurement since the distance offset is time-varying. Since the spectra at unintentional distances are uncorrelated, the spectrum shift calculated with an uncorrelated spectrum results in a spurious vibration, which is a measured waveform that is different from the actual vibration waveform and that constitutes a measurement error in a DAS measurement. We propose a technique to compensate for the spurious vibration. The technique estimates the vibration-induced distance offset by calculating the cross-correlation between Rayleigh backscattered light waveforms and shifts the spectrum analysis range by the estimated offset in order to track the consistent spectrum. We perform a DAS measurement on a sensing fiber that experiences simultaneous vibrations at different distances and confirm the validity of the proposed technique.