A distributed fiber vibration sensor utilizing dispersion induced walk-off effect in a unidirectional Mach-Zehnder interferometer.

We propose and experimentally demonstrate a novel ultra-long range and sensitive distributed fiber vibration sensor. Only one unidirectional Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) is employed in this scheme as the sensing element. In this sensor structure, we utilize chromatic dispersion-induced walk-off effect between the vibration signals sensed by two distributed feedback (DFB) lasers at different wavelengths to locate the vibration position. Vibration signals with frequencies up to 9 MHz can be detected and the spatial resolution of 31 m is achieved over 320 km of the standard single mode fiber. Monitoring multiple vibration sources can also be realized using this scheme.