Brillouin scattering spectrum in photonic crystal fiber with a partially germanium-doped core

Review of Specialty Fiber Based Brillouin Optical Time Domain Analysis Technology

Specialty fibers have introduced new functionalities and opportunities in distributed fiber sensing applications. Particularly, Brillouin optical time domain analysis (BOTDA) systems have leveraged the unique features of specialty fibers to achieve performance enhancement in various sensing applications. This paper provides an overview of recent developments of the specialty fibers based BOTDA technologies and their sensing applications. The specialty fibers based BOTDA systems are categorized and reviewed based on the new features or performance enhancements. The prospects of using specialty fibers for BOTDA systems are discussed.

Review: distributed time-domain sensors based on Brillouin scattering and FWM enhanced SBS for temperature, strain and acoustic wave detection

Distributed time-domain Brillouin scattering fiber sensors have been widely used to measure the changes of the temperature and strain. The linear dependence of the temperature and strain on the Brillouin frequency shift enabled the distributed temperature and strain sensing based on mapping of the Brillouin gain spectrum. In addition, an acoustic wave can be detected by the four wave mixing (FWM) associated SBS process, in which phase matching condition is satisfied via up-down conversion of SBS process through birefringence matching before and after the conversion process. Brillouin scattering can be considered as the scattering of a pump wave from a moving grating (acoustic phonon) which induces a Doppler frequency shift in the resulting Stokes wave. The frequency shift is dependent on many factors including the velocity of sound in the scattering medium as well as the index of refraction. Such a process can be used to monitor the gain of random fiber laser based on SBS, the distributed acoustic wave reflect the distributed SBS gain for random lasing radiation, as well as the relative intensity noise inside the laser gain medium. In this review paper, the distributed time-domain sensing system based on Brillouin scattering including Brillouin optical time-domain reflectometry (BOTDR), Brillouin optical time-domain analysis (BOTDA), and FWM enhanced SBS for acoustic wave detection are introduced for their working principles and recent progress. The distributed Brillouin sensors based on specialty fibers for simultaneous temperature and strain measurement are summarized. Applications for the Brillouin scattering time-domain sensors are briefly discussed.

Recent Advances in Brillouin Optical Time Domain Reflectometry

In the past two decades Brillouin-based sensors have emerged as a newly-developed optical fiber sensing technology for distributed temperature and strain measurements. Among these, the Brillouin optical time domain reflectometer (BOTDR) has attracted more and more research attention, because of its exclusive advantages, including single-end access, simple system architecture, easy implementation and widespread field applications. It is realized mainly by injecting optical pulses into the fiber and detecting the Brillouin frequency shift (BFS), which is linearly related to the change of ambient temperature and axial strain of the sensing fiber. In this paper, the authors provide a review of new progress on performance improvement and applications of BOTDR in the last decade. Firstly, the recent advances in improving the performance of BOTDRs are summarized, such as spatial resolution, signal-to-noise ratio and measurement accuracy, measurement speed, cross sensitivity and other properties. Moreover, novel-type optical fibers bring new characteristics to optic fiber sensors, hence we introduce the different Brillouin sensing features of special fibers, mainly covering the plastic optical fiber, photonic crystal fiber, few-mode fiber and other special fibers. Additionally, we present a brief overview of BOTDR application scenarios in many industrial fields and intelligent perception, including structural health monitoring of large-range infrastructure, geological disaster prewarning and other applications. To conclude, we discuss several challenges and prospects in the future development of BOTDRs.

Potential for simultaneous strain and temperature sensing based on Brillouin scattering in an all-solid photonic bandgap fiber

We identify the Brillouin scattering spectrum in both the core and the cladding of an all-solid photonic bandgap fiber for the first time to our knowledge. A multipeak Brillouin spectrum with several frequency shifts and particular linewidths is investigated and related to the structural properties accordingly. Because of the different frequency dependences on the surroundings in the core and the cladding, the proposed structure exhibits potential for use as simultaneous temperature and strain sensors.

Suppression of stimulated Brillouin scattering in all-solid chalcogenide-tellurite photonic bandgap fiber

A new way to suppress stimulated Brillouin scattering by using an all-solid chalcogenide-tellurite photonic bandgap fiber is presented in the paper. The compositions of the chalcogenide and the tellurite glass are As(2)Se(3) and TeO(2)-ZnO-Li(2)O-Bi(2)O(3). The light and the acoustic wave are confined in the fiber by photonic bandgap and acoustic bandgap mechanism, respectively. When the pump wavelength is within the photonic bandgap and the acoustic wave generated by the pump light is outside the acoustic bandgap, the interaction between the optical and the acoustic modes is very weak, thus stimulated Brillouin scattering is suppressed in the photonic bandgap fiber.

Experimental investigation on Brillouin scattering property in highly nonlinear photonic crystal fiber with hybrid core

Brillouin scattering property in a highly nonlinear photonic crystal fiber (HNL-PCF) with hybrid-core structure is experimentally investigated. The HNL-PCF comprises a highly Ge-doped core surrounded by a triangularly-arranged F-doped buffer. It is experimentally shown that there exist five Brillouin resonance peaks with ~300 MHz frequency spacing in the Brillouin gain spectrum, which can be classified into two groups physcially attributed to two spatially separated layers of Ge-doped and F-doped regions. These peaks have similar linear dispersion characteristics and their effective acoustic velocities increase monotonically by the order of the peaks. The acousto-optic overlapping efficiency in the fiber is measured to be ~50%, which indicates that the stimulated Brillouin scattering threshold in the HNL-PCF is twofold enhanced. The temperature and strain dependences of the first resonance peak are also investigated, showing the similar behaviors as those in all-silica optical fibers.

Recent progress in Brillouin scattering based fiber sensors

Brillouin scattering in optical fiber describes the interaction of an electro-magnetic field (photon) with a characteristic density variation of the fiber. When the electric field amplitude of an optical beam (so-called pump wave), and another wave is introduced at the downshifted Brillouin frequency (namely Stokes wave), the beating between the pump and Stokes waves creates a modified density change via the electrostriction effect, resulting in so-called the stimulated Brillouin scattering. The density variation is associated with a mechanical acoustic wave; and it may be affected by local temperature, strain, and vibration which induce changes in the fiber effective refractive index and sound velocity. Through the measurement of the static or dynamic changes in Brillouin frequency along the fiber one can realize a distributed fiber sensor for local temperature, strain and vibration over tens or hundreds of kilometers. This paper reviews the progress on improving sensing performance parameters like spatial resolution, sensing length limitation and simultaneous temperature and strain measurement. These kinds of sensors can be used in civil structural monitoring of pipelines, bridges, dams, and railroads for disaster prevention. Analogous to the static Bragg grating, one can write a moving Brillouin grating in fibers, with the lifetime of the acoustic wave. The length of the Brillouin grating can be controlled by the writing pulses at any position in fibers. Such gratings can be used to measure changes in birefringence, which is an important parameter in fiber communications. Applications for this kind of sensor can be found in aerospace, material processing and fine structures.

Vector Brillouin optical time-domain analyzer for high-order acoustic modes

Thanks to a double-frequency phase modulation scheme, we report a vector Brillouin optical time-domain analyzer (BOTDA). This BOTDA has a high immunity level to noise, and it features a phase spectrogram capability. It is well suited for complex situations involving several acoustic resonances, such as high-order longitudinal modes. It has notably been used to characterize a dispersion-shifted fiber, allowing us to report spectrograms with multiple acoustic resonances. A very high 57 dB dynamic range is also reported for 100-ns-long pulses simultaneously with a 16 cm numerical resolution.

Birefringence in microstructure fiber with elliptical GeO2 highly doped inclusion in the core

We studied both numerically and experimentally a birefringence in a microstructure fiber with elliptical inclusion highly doped with GeO(2). We demonstrate that such inclusion increases the phase modal birefringence and modifies its dispersion in the short wavelength range, thus causing that group birefringence crosses zero value at a certain wavelength. Moreover, we numerically analyzed different factors contributing to the overall fiber birefringence, including geometrical birefringence induced by holes distribution and ellipticity of the inclusion as well as stress birefringence associated with thermal shrinkage of the doped glass.

Stimulated Brillouin scattering in highly birefringent microstructure fiber: experimental analysis

We report on an experimental analysis of stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) in a 20-m-long highly birefringent microstructure fiber for sensing applications. In particular, an experimental setup based on Brillouin optical frequency-domain analysis, operating at a wavelength of 1550 nm, has been employed in order to analyze the distribution of Brillouin frequency shift along the fiber, as well as to study the dependence of Brillouin frequency shift on optical polarization, temperature, and strain. Our results indicate that, for any fixed polarization, the fiber has a dual-peaked Brillouin spectrum. A study about the origin of these two peaks is presented.

Influences of pump wavelength and environment temperature on the dual-peaked Brillouin property of a small-core microstructure fiber

The influences of the pump wavelength and temperature on the dual-peaked Brillouin property of a piece of a small-core microstructure fiber are investigated using the heterodyne method. The experimental results indicate that the dispersion characteristics of the acoustical modes participating in the Brillouin scattering are formed by the coupling of two acoustical modes with different acoustical field distributions. The influence of the pump wavelength can contribute to the variation of the acoustical mode wave vectors. On the other hand, the influence of the environment temperature can contribute to the shift of acoustical mode dispersion map by the variation of the material mechanical parameters and thermal expansion. The model and experiment results demonstrate that the height ratio of the two Brillouin peaks can be controlled by adjusting the pump wavelength or environment temperature.

Effect of Brillouin slow light on distributed Brillouin fiber sensors

The effect of Brillouin slow light on distributed Brillouin fiber sensors (DBFSs) is studied. We demonstrate Brillouin slow light for a 1.2 ns pulse with peak powers (PS) from 3.3 to 56.2 mW on depletion of the pump power (PP) ranging from 1.3 to 83.2 mW in conventional optical fibers (SMF-28). Experiments show that, when pump power depletion is not negligible, for a given PP the Brillouin gain and delay time of a pulse decrease when PS increases in a long (> or =10 km) sensing fiber. The optimum pump beam depletion resulting from strong interaction of the pump and the probe in the fiber provides accurate temperature and strain information at a high spatial resolution. Our study reveals that at low PP the spatial resolution error caused by the pulse delay for a DBFS with centimeter spatial resolution is less than 5% of the pulse length.

Brillouin characterization of holey optical fibers

We report the results of detailed measurements on the Brillouin frequency shift (BFS), gain bandwidth, and gain coefficients of several small-core holey optical fibers (HFs) of both uniform and axially varying structural characteristics and compare these with measurements on more conventional fibers. Our measurements show that the BFS of HFs is first-order proportional to the modal index for light propagating along the fiber and is thus extremely sensitive to its precise structural parameters. Our results highlight the possibility of using distributed Brillouin scattering measurements to perform nondestructive structural characterization of HFs, and the possibility of producing Brillouin-suppressed HFs using controlled structural variation along the fiber length.

Effect of optical phase on a distributed Brillouin sensor at centimeter spatial resolution

Because of the power imbalance between the two arms of an interferometer in an electro-optic modulator (EOM), the output of the EOM is combined amplitude modulation (AM) and phase modulation (PM) for the probe signal consisting of the pulse and the dc component. Because of this PM, the Brillouin gain-loss spectrum becomes asymmetric. The central Brillouin frequency is shifted from that of an AM pulse. The maximum extinction ratio of the EOM is limited to approximately 29 dB for a power-splitting ratio of 51% to 49%. The asymmetric property induced by PM is not pulse shape dependent; for both Gaussian- and super-Gaussian-shaped pulses the Brillouin loss spectrum is symmetric for AM and asymmetric for combined AM and PM (power imbalance).

Dependence of the brillouin frequency shift on strain and temperature in a photonic crystal fiber

The dependence of the Brillouin frequency shift on strain in a photonic crystal fiber (PCF) was measured at a wavelength of 1320 nm for the first time to the authors' knowledge. Together with measurements of the dependence of the Brillouin frequency shift on temperature in the PCF, we demonstrate the feasibility of the highly precise simultaneous measurement of temperature and strain by use of the PCF in a distributed Brillouin sensing system with a spatial resolution of 15 cm.