Advanced Brillouin-based distributed optical fibre sensors with sub-meter scale spatial resolution

Abstract

Classical configurations of Brillouin distributed optical fibre sensors show a spatial resolution limited by the phonon lifetime to 1 meter. Novel approaches can substantially overcome this limit through the prior activation of the acoustic wave.

Brillouin Distributed Fiber Sensors: An Overview and Applications

“…The mentioned methods achieve the goal of simultaneously high spatial and spectral resolution thanks to an acoustic field preactivated by a low intensity prepump pulse [31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41] or a continuous pump background [42] (see Figure 7). Even, when the pump is restored to a nonnull intensity after the pulse, it interacts with the decaying acoustic wave, producing "echoes" in the acquired signal [35].…”