Two innovative optical fiber cable layouts designed to improve strain measurement accuracy for Brillouin Optical Time Domain Analysis (BOTDA) sensors through improved transfer efficiency are presented and discussed. Swept Wavelength Interferometry (SWI) is used experimentally evaluate their performance alongside analytical models numerical simulation Finite Element Method (FEM). The results sho...

Systematic errors induced by distortions in the pump pulse of conventional Brillouin distributed fiber sensors are thoroughly investigated. Experimental results, supported by a theoretical analysis, demonstrate that the two probe sidebands in standard Brillouin optical time-domain analyzers provide a non-zero net gain on the pump pulse, inducing severe distortions of the pump when scanning the ...

The impact wave response of soil due to a ball drop is monitored on a 30.5 cm by 30.5 cm square soil box using a fiber sensor with dynamic strain sensing capability. The experiments are conducted in real time using a simple one-laser one-modulator configuration with stimulated Brillouin scattering. The embedded BOTDA sensor grid successfully monitored the distribution and evolution of the inner...

A technique to detect real time variations of temperature or strain in Brillouin based distributed fiber sensors is proposed and is investigated in this paper. The technique is based on anomaly detection methods such as the RX-algorithm. Detection and isolation of dynamic events from the static ones are demonstrated by a proper processing of the Brillouin gain values obtained by using a standar...

A distributed optical fiber sensor with the capability of simultaneously measuring temperature and strain is proposed using a large effective area non-zero dispersion shifted fiber (LEAF) with sub-meter spatial resolution. The Brillouin frequency shift is measured using Brillouin optical time-domain analysis (BOTDA) with differential pulse-width pair technique, while the spectrum shift of the R...