Distributed Pressure and Temperature Sensing Based on Stimulated Brillouin Scattering

Brillouin scattering has been verified to be an effective mechanism in temperature and strain sensing. This kind of sensors can be applied to civil structural monitoring of pipelines, railroads, and other industries for disaster prevention. This thesis first presents a novel fiber sensing scheme for long-span fully-distributed pressure measurement based on Brillouin scattering in a side-hole fiber. After that, it demonstrates that Brillouin frequency keeps linear relation with temperature up to 1000°C; Brillouin scattering is a promising mechanism in high temperature distributed sensing.

A side-hole fiber has two longitudinal air holes in the fiber cladding. When a pressure is applied on the fiber, the two principal axes of the fiber birefringence yield different Brillouin frequency shifts in the Brillouin scattering. The differential Brillouin scattering continuously along the fiber thus permits distributed pressure measurement. Our sensor system was designed to analyze the Brillouin scattering in the two principal axes of a side-hole fiber in time domain. The developed system was tested under pressure from 0 to 10,000 psi for 100m and 600m side-hole fibers, respectively. Experimental results show fibers with side holes of different sizes possess different pressure sensitivities. The highest sensitivity of the measured pressure induced differential Brillouin frequency shift is 0.0012MHz/psi. The demonstrated spatial resolution is 2m, which maybe further improved by using shorter light pulses.