Overcoming Performance Limitations of Distributed Brillouin Fiber Laser Sensors

Distributed fiber sensors are a powerful tool for structural health monitoring and environmental sensing due to their ability to remotely monitor the strain at 1,000s of locations using low-cost optical fiber. Sensors based on Brillouin scattering are uniquely suited to these tasks since they can make completely distributed, absolute measurements of strain, with a long range (>100 km), small sensing size (<1 cm), and a huge absolute dynamic range, all in standard off-the-shelf telecom fiber. These sensors function by measuring the resonance frequency of the non-linear Brillouin interaction in fiber which shifts linearly with strain and temperature.