Distributed fiber-optic vibration sensors receive extensive investigation and play a significant role in the sensor panorama. Optical parameters such as light intensity, phase, polarization state, or light frequency will change when external vibration is applied on the sensing fiber. In this paper, various technologies of distributed fiber-optic vibration sensing are reviewed, from interferometric sensing technology, such as Sagnac, Mach–Zehnder, and Michelson, to backscattering-based sensing technology, such as phase-sensitive optical time domain reflectometer, polarization-optical time domain reflectometer, optical frequency domain reflectometer, as well as some combinations of interferometric and backscattering-based techniques. Their operation principles are presented and recent research efforts are also included. Finally, the applications of distributed fiber-optic vibration sensors are summarized, which mainly include structural health monitoring and perimeter security, etc. Overall, distributed fiber-optic vibration sensors possess the advantages of large-scale monitoring, good concealment, excellent flexibility, and immunity to electromagnetic interference, and thus show considerable potential for a variety of practical applications.

Recently, phase-sensitive Optical Time-Domain Reflectometry (Φ-OTDR)-based vibration sensor systems have gained the interest of many researchers and some efforts have been undertaken to push the performance limitations of Φ-OTDR sensor systems. Thus, progress in different areas of their performance evaluation factors such as improvement of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), spatial resolution (SR) in the sub-meter range, enlargement of the sensing range, increased frequency response bandwidth over the conventional limits, phase signal demodulation and chirped-pulse Φ-OTDR for quantitative measurement have been realized. This paper presents an overview of the recent progress in Φ-OTDR-based vibration sensing systems in the different areas mentioned above.

A single-loop fourth-order sigma-delta (RD) interface circuit for micromachined accelerometer is presented in this study. Two additional electronic integrators are cascaded with the micromachine sensing element to form a fourth-order loop filter to eliminate quantization noise. A precise model for the overall system is set up based on nonlinear model of 1-bit quantizer. Three main noise sources affecting the overall system resolution of a RD accelerometer: mechanical noise, electronic noise and quantization noise are analyzed in more detail. A switchedcapacitor charge integrator and correlated double sampling are applied to reduce input-referred electronic noise. The ASIC is fabricated in 0.5 lm two-metal two-poly n-well CMOS process, and test results show that the noise density floors of the open-loop and closed-loop modes are 12 and 80 lg/Hz 1/2 , respectively, the sensitivity is 1.25 V/g, the full measurement range can be achieved from -2 to ?2 g, and the power dissipation is 40 mW.

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