Steady-sensitivity distributed acoustic sensors

Abstract

Distributed acoustic sensors (DAS) based on phase-sensitive optical time-domain reflectometry (phiOTDR) have demonstrated interesting performance for many applications ranging from seismology to pipeline protection. However, the sensitivity of traditional DAS relying on coherent detection is strongly dependent on the system noise and trace fading points, offering poor reliability of the results in the spatial dimension. In this manuscript, we evaluate the statistical performance of a recently proposed DAS technique, namely, chirped-pulse phiOTDR, in terms of sensitivity and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Our results show behavioral trends that significantly differ from those of traditional DAS. In particular, the acoustic SNR distribution in chirped-pulse DAS is notably narrower than that in the traditional case, allowing to ensure a large system dynamic range across all the points of the optical trace. Hence, chirped-pulse phiOTDR offers localized perturbation detection with very high reliability, almost independent of trace fading points, along the complete reachable range of the sensor.