Spectroscopy is the basic tool for studying molecular physics and realizing biochemical sensing. However, it is challenging to realize sub-femtometer resolution spectroscopy over broad bandwidth. Broadband and high-resolution spectroscopy with calibrated optical frequency is demonstrated by bridging the fields of speckle pattern and electro-optic frequency comb. A wavemeter based on a whispering-gallery-mode barcode is proposed to link the frequencies of a probe continuous-wave laser and an ultrastable laser. The ultrafine electro-optic comb lines are generated from the probe laser to record spectrum of sample with sub-femtometer resolution. Measurement bandwidth is a thousandfold broader than comb bandwidth, by sequentially tuning the probe laser while its wavelength is determined. This approach fully exploits the advantages of two fields to realize 0.8-fm resolution with a fiber laser and 80-nm bandwidth with an external cavity diode laser. The spectroscopic measurements of an ultrahigh Q-factor cavity and gas molecular absorption are experimentally demonstrated. The compact system, predominantly constituted by few-gigahertz electronics and telecommunication components, shows enormous potential for practical spectroscopic applications.
Partial discharge often occurs in power equipment, which erodes insulation and eventually results in insulation failure. As partial discharge will generate sound such as acoustic or ultrasonic waves, a phase-sensitive optical time-domain reflectometry (φ-OTDR) is used to measure these signals. Then the number and locations of sound sources can be calculated using array signal processing methods such as Gerschgorin circle theorem and MUSIC (multiple signal classification) algorithm. In the experiment, several sound sources with frequencies below 600 kHz are used to simulate the partial discharges. Our system shows a high sensitivity and strong noise resistance performance. Accurate number estimation is realized with positioning errors less than 3 cm
Brillouin optical correlation domain analysis (BOCDA) offers high spatial resolution and multi-point measurement capabilities which are ideal for transformer winding temperature measurements. In this article, a BOCDA prototype is developed by changing many equipment to modules, and using field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA) for the control, acquisition, and processing. The system achieves a desired performance with a spatial resolution of 10 cm, a Brillouin frequency shift (BFS) accuracy of about 0.9 MHz, and a measurement speed of 500 points/second.
In this paper, a novel distributed Raman distributed temperature sensing system based on pulse compression technique using hybrid modulation method is proposed. The structure of the new system and the corresponding modulation and demodulation methods are described. The system performance is verified by experiments. This scheme solves the inherent problem of mutual restrictions between spatial resolution and temperature resolution existed in conventional Raman distributed temperature sensing systems. Compared with the other scheme not using coding, the hybrid modulation method using intra-pulse sweep and inter-pulse coding not only mitigates the transient effect existed in the fiber amplifier, which results in a better performance.
We demonstrate direct time-domain bandwidth measurement of 11 cm-long multimode polymer waveguides based on an optical sampling technique for the first time. The pulse shape can be recovered after propagating waveguides due to the advantages of large bandwidth (low time resolution) of optical sampling technology. A reduction in averaged bandwidth (bandwidth-length product) from 241 GHz (27 GHz·m) to 180 GHz (20 GHz·m) of straight waveguides is observed when using mode scramblers to fully stimulate the higher-order modes. The effects such as bending and crossing structure of the waveguides on the bandwidth are also investigated. The proposed method is effective for measuring the bandwidth and dispersion of meter and centimeter-long waveguides, fibers and optical devices
The paper introduces the DAS system based on advanced phase-sensitive optical time domain reflectometry (φ-OTDR) with fading noise suppressed. Besides, the DAS system based on time-gated digital optical frequency domain reflectometry (TGD-OFDR) and its improved systems are introduced. The application of DAS in railway perimeter security is introduced at the end of the paper.
We propose a novel method to increase sensing points of Brillouin optical correlation domain analysis (BOCDA) by utilizing degenerated four-wave-mixing (FWM) process. A sinusoidally frequency-modulated lightwave is used as the pump of FWM, and the generated idlers have a broadened frequency modulation span. The idlers produced by FWM are used in BOCDA system to increase the sensing points of BOCDA since the number is proportional to the frequency modulation span of the laser source. We experimentally demonstrate a modulation span of 74 GHz by using the firstorder idler produced by FWM process, which is the largest frequency modulation span achieved in BOCDA system, doubling the sensing points of BOCDA from 1936 to 3872. It provides a possibility to use this method in the state-of-art BOCDA system to achieve several millions of effective sensing points.
The frequency division multiplexing (FDM) technique is firstly introduced into a direct-detection phase-sensitive OTDR to improve the distributed fiber acoustic sensing performance by using a frequency step sweeping laser source and a dual probe pulse scheme. By using FDM technique, a 40 kHz sampling rate to vibration is realized with a 10 km measurement range, which implies the tradeoff between the frequency response and the measurement range is broken. In experiment, a 6 kHz vibration is successfully measured.
A novel distributed fiber-optic vibration sensor (DVS) is proposed based on multi-pulse time-gated digital optical frequency domain reflectometry (TGD-OFDR), which can solve both the trade-off between the maximum measurable distance and the spatial resolution, and the one between the measurement distance and the vibration response bandwidth. A 21-kHz vibration is detected experimentally over 10-kilometer-long fiber, with a signal-to-noise ratio approaching 25 dB and a spatial resolution of 10 m.
We present a newly developed high performance fiber optics sensor for quasi-static strain measurement. The sensor consists of a piece of π-phase shifted FBG for static strain sensing, and fiber Fabry-Perot interferometer for reference, interrogated by an improved sideband interrogation method with real-time feedback loops. Strain resolution of 0.12 nano-strain was achieved with sampling rate up to 1 kS/s in laboratory experiments. Compared with previous sensor systems, the proposed method shows great improvement in the sensing rate as well as the resolution.
KEYWORDS: Spatial resolution, Signal to noise ratio, Vibrometry, Sensors, Reflectometry, Optical fibers, Phase measurement, Magnetic sensors, Signal detection, Geometrical optics
We demonstrate a novel distributed fiber vibration sensor based on the phase extraction from time-gated digital optical frequency domain reflectometry (TGD-OFDR), which have an advantage of wide dynamic range. With the much improved signal to noise ratio (SNR) compared to conventional phase-sensitive optical time domain reflectometry (OTDR), the phase of optical signals is extracted over a long distance up to 29 km with 2.2 m spatial resolution.
We demonstrate a novel method to compensate the optical source phase noise in long-range OFDR by using an optical fiber delay loop (OFDL). In this method, a 10 km OFDL is incorporated in the reference interferometer of the reflectometry. A frequency shifter is used to count the circulation rounds of the light traveling in OFDL. The preliminary “proof-of-concept” experiment shows a successful compensation effect and an 11 cm spatial resolution over 20 km measurement range is realized by this method.
In this invited talk, we will present the advances in research and development activities of optical reflectometry in our laboratory. The performance of phase-sensitive coherent OTDR, which is developed for distributed vibration measurement, is reported with the results of field tests. The performance of time-gated digital OFDR, which is developed for optical access network diagnostics, is also reported. We will also discuss how to increase the frequency sweep span of the linearly-swept optical source, a very important part for improving the performance of optical reflectometry.
We developed a novel optical coherent domain reflectometer (OCDR) technique with large measurement range by using of dual frequency modulation. The probe and local oscillator beams are frequency modulated independently, and the sensing position can be adjusted digitally via the time delay between the driving signals for the two modulators. Meanwhile, the frequency tuning spans of the two paths are different to enable heterodyne detection. In the demonstrational experiments, a spatial resolution of 3.9 m over a range of 24.6 km fiber was achieved with 35 MHz tunable range of the modulator, and the spatial resolution keeps a constant over the whole measurement range.
We reported an optical fiber based temperature sensor with mK-order resolution, wide temperature range and excellent long term stability. The sensor composes of a fiber Bragg grating (FBG) as the sensing element, an HCN gas cell for absolute frequency reference. A distributed feedback diode laser with current modulation is used as the light source. To overcome the frequency-sweep nonlinearity of the laser, an auxiliary Fabry-Perot interferometer with free spectrum range of 10 MHz is employed. A cross-correlation algorithm is employed to calculate the center frequency difference between the FBG and the gas cell. With the proposed configuration, a temperature resolution of 0.41 mK was demonstrated in experiment. To the best knowledge, this is the first time that an mK order temperature resolution has been achieved by optical fiber sensor.
We demonstrate a method for high spatial resolution optical frequency domain reflectometry (OFDR) by utilizing degenerated four-wave-mixing (FWM) for broadening the frequency sweeping. High order sideband is obtained from an optical comb and is consequently utilized as the pump for the FWM. An idler wavelength is produced after the FWM and 21-times broadened optical frequency sweeping is achieved compared with the radio frequency (RF) sweeping. 0.75-cm spatial resolution is obtained with RF frequency sweeping span of 638.4 MHz.
High-order and cascaded four-wave-mixing (FWM) is utilized for enhancing the strain sensitivity of an FBG sensor based on all-optical frequency chirp magnification. 7.6-pm/με strain sensitivity is obtained for a conventional FBG sensor, which has been magnified by a factor of six.
Recent progress on novel long-range coherent optical frequency domain reflectometry is described along with its
applications to diagnosing problems with optical fiber cables. The measurement range of a conventional C-OFDR is
limited to the coherence length of the laser used as a light source, since the phase noise of the laser degrades the
sharpness of the beat spectrum. We have developed phase-noise-compensated optical frequency domain reflectometry
(PNC-OFDR) to overcome this limit, by introducing a novel phase-noise compensation technique, and achieved a very
high-resolution measurement over the fiber link length. We describe the principle of PNC-OFDR and recent related
developments, and discuss its use in diagnosing issues with fiber networks.
We show that the noise of long range optical frequency domain reflectometry (OFDR) after compensating for the phase
noise of the optical source results from environmental acoustic perturbation rather than the compensation process. If both
the auxiliary and measurement interferometers are insulated against acoustic noise, the phase noise compensation
scheme works almost ideally even over a 20-km range, with at least eight-fold concatenation. Although the spatial
resolution achieved by phase-noise compensated OFDR (PNC-OFDR) is influenced by the environmental acoustic
perturbation, a resolution of ~10 cm was achieved over 20 km in a normal laboratory environment by insulating the
auxiliary interferometer. This approach can be used for mid to long range network diagnosis with a narrow spatial
resolution, which is unachievable with other technologies.
Highly sensitive reflectometry over 20 km with a sub-meter spatial resolution based on phase noise compensated optical
frequency domain reflectometry and the concatenative reference method is proposed and demonstrated experimentally.
A fiber laser is used as a light source to extend the measurement range although the distance remains limited to the laser
coherence length because of the existence of laser phase noise. To reduce the influence of laser phase noise, the
measurement signal is compensated using reference signals generated from a single auxiliary interferometer supported
by a newly developed compensation process. By using the proposed technique, the measurement range is extended to 20
km with a sub-meter resolution and a sensitivity (relative to the Rayleigh backscattering level) of about -30 dB, which is
nearly impossible to realize with the OTDR technique. The entire measurement time is 20 ms and the processing time is
20 s for each section.
A novel scheme of distributed fiber-optic strain sensor by localizing a dynamic grating in polarization maintaining erbium-doped fiber is proposed. The dynamic grating, which is introduced by launching two counter-propagating coherent light-beams into pumped erbium-doped fiber per the phenomenon of gain saturation, is examined. Theoretical modeling of the dynamic grating is given and used to make simulations on the reflectivity of the dynamic grating localized by synthesizing the optical coherence function. Theoretical analysis and numerical simulation on the novel sensor scheme show that the Bragg frequency of the dynamic grating will shift according to strain by 0.426MHz/με for typical polarization maintaining erbium-doped fiber.
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