Distributed sensing optical fibers have been recognized for their unparalleled ability in discriminating and measuring environmental variables on strain, temperature, and vibration behaviors. For its ubiquitous industrial values in monitoring dynamic events in pipelines, railroads, perimeter surveillance, subsea, highway and so forth, distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) market is expected to grow steadily in the next few years. However, the inferior thermal stability of standard optical fiber coating, along with the native weakness Rayleigh scattering reflectivity, make the traditional telecommunication grade fibers-based DAS component suboptimal for mid-temperature environment deployment such as oilfield exploration and detection. Here, we report DAS fibers prototype with enhanced backscattering reflection and improved thermal robustness for feasible mid-temperature application. Typically, the 8/125/200 μm DAS fiber is fabricated from a G.652 compliant single-mode preform, coated with dual-layer of proprietary UV curable and high optical transparent write-through coatings, and further followed by a post-draw UV processing technology to increase the elastic scattering reflectivity in the optical fiber. Depending on the selected coating materials and fiber designs, developed DAS fibers are demonstrated with low level of OTDR attenuation, enhanced elastic backscattering signal amplitude about 15+ dB above Rayleigh level, and exceptional thermal reliability against elevated temperature conditions.
This study presents a high-temperature distributed acoustic sensor (HT-DAS) optical fiber that utilizes a single layer of unique specialty coating with elevated thermal stability applied atop a 125 μm single-mode transmission fiber, where the fiber features enhanced Rayleigh backscattering sensitivity combined with long-term robustness and survivability up to 150 °. The developed HT-DAS fiber possesses a similar level of mechanical strength and transmission loss as most industrial specialty and telecommunication optical fibers, but also exhibits remarkable distributed sensing characteristics: enhanced elastic backscattering signal intensity about 12 dB above the base Rayleigh scattering level of non-enhanced fiber. Most importantly, this fiber extends service feasibility to a relatively high temperature regime for 1 year at about 150°C, according to life-time estimation based on thermogravimetric analysis, failure mode analysis, and accelerated aging reliability test.
We demonstrate a 1km long optical fiber with continuous grating enhanced back scattering and attenuation close to standard single mode fiber. Scattering was observed to be more than 10dB above the Rayleigh back scattering of the optical fiber over a 10nm bandwidth between 1542 and 1552nm. The fiber attenuation was estimated to be 0.4dB/km. Our result was enabled through the fabrication of a standard single mode fiber with a UV transparent coating and reel to reel continuous UV grating inscription over more than 1km. We anticipate that enhanced scattering fiber will have impact in many sensor systems that rely on optical back scatter, including distributed acoustic sensing, security applications and structural health monitoring.
We describe the fabrication and performance of a continuously grated twisted multicore fiber sensor array. The grated fiber sensor comprises nearly continuous Bragg gratings along its entire length. The gratings are inscribed over lengths in excess of 10m in fibers with UV transparent coating using a flexible and scalable reel to reel processing system. The arrays are tested using optical frequency domain reflectometry (OFDR). We report on automated analysis routines applied to these OFDR measurements that allow for characterization of 100s of individual grating exposures that make up a continuously grated fiber length. We also report on the spectral loss of the continuously grated fiber, showing that it is suitable for applications with sensors in excess of 100m. Finally, we report on the fiber sensing characteristics by performing measurements of fiber bend using a fiber shape reconstruction algorithm on OFDR traces obtained from four of the fiber cores.
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