Distributed acoustic sensing using multi-band time-gated digital orthogonal frequency domain reflectometry

Abstract

Systems, methods, and structures that provide distributed acoustic sensing using chirped optical pulses of selectable duration and bandwidth, at a frame rate limited by a round-trip propagation time of a fiber under test. Instead of processing a transmitted chirped pulse as a single sequence—our systems, methods, and structures employ a parallel fragmented multiband architecture, where each tributary correlates the received signal with a truncated chirped pulse to obtain the Rayleigh impulse response over its frequency band. By reducing the duration of the chirp processed by each tributary, spatial leakage is reduced at all the tributaries, thus even after combining all the interferometric products from all tributaries using a rotated vector sum, the resultant signal is much less impacted by spatial leakage than by using a conventional TGD-OFDR method.