Quantitative characteristic of phase signal with changed pulse in the coherent PHI-OTDR system

Abstract

In the coherent -OTDR system, the phase signal is retrieved based on the reference point and the observation point which are off and closer to the two sides of step of the phase change. In the experiment, the optical pulse with the changed peak power, width or shape is injected into the fiber for interrogating the change of the quantitative characteristic of the measured phase signal. When the pulse width is fixed at 200 ns and its peak power is adjusted from 14 dBm to -23 dBm, the amplitude is slightly increased from 17.3575 rad to 17.4411 rad as long as the Rayleigh backscattering signal can be found in the electrical signal. Changing the pulse width from 260 ns to 80 ns when the peak power is fixed at 14 dBm, the maximum amplitude and the minimum amplitude of the measured phase signal are 17.4625 rad to 17.4509 rad, respectively. When the arbitrary shape of the optical pulse generated from the MZI structure with a changed delay fiber from 3 m to 6 m, the amplitude varies from 17.4558 rad to 17.4819 rad. For every measurement, the change of frequency is also small. And the small value of standard deviation supports the accuracy of the measurement. All the measurements show that the changed pulse nearly has no impact on the quantitative characteristic of the measured phase signal in the coherent -OTDR system.