Distributed fiber strain sensor with 1-kHz sampling rate based on Brillouin optical correlation domain analysis

Abstract

We report the highest speed distributed sensing of dynamic strain based on stimulated Brillouin scattering in optical fibers. A sampling rate of 1 kHz, more than an order of magnitude higher than the former best result, is achieved by applying a simplified Brillouin optical correlation domain analysis with optimized time gates and an unbalanced Mach-Zehnder delay line. In experiments, we present the measurement of various dynamic strains at the maximum frequency of 200 Hz with 10-cm spatial resolution and 20-m measurement range.