New fiber optic sensors transmit data up to 100 times faster

EurekAlert  November 16, 2020
Distributed optical fibre sensors deliver a map of a physical quantity along an optical fibre, providing a unique solution for health monitoring of targeted structures. An international team of researchers (China, Switzerland, Chile) propose a technique encoding the interrogating light signal by a single-sequence aperiodic code and spatially resolving the fibre information through a fast-post-processing. The code sequence is once forever computed by a specifically developed genetic algorithm, enabling a performance enhancement using an unmodified conventional configuration for the sensor. They demonstrated in Brillouin and Raman based sensors, both outperforming the state-of-the-art sensors. The new technique can be readily implemented in existing instruments by only modifying the software, offering a simple and cost-effective upgrade towards higher performance for distributed fibre sensing…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE