Dual Sagnac Interferometer Distributed Optical Fiber Localization Method Based on Hilbert–Huang Transform

Abstract

In order to solve the problem that the dual Mach Zehnder (M-Z) interferometer system is easily affected by external environmental noise, a data signal-processing scheme based on Hilbert–Huang transform (HHT) is proposed to achieve high-precision location with distributed optical fibers. The polarization compensation module has a built-in dual Sagnac interferometer system which is used to stabilize the polarization state of the Sagnac interferometer. The eigenmode function is obtained by empirical mode decomposition of the received two optical signals, and then the Hilbert spectrum is obtained by superimposing the Hilbert transform, so that the high-similarity curve caused by the vibration signal can be clearly and intuitively extracted. The optical signal information can be calculated based on the cross-correlation and delay estimation algorithm to accurately obtain the vibration position information. The experimental results show that the positioning accuracy can reach ±11 m, with a sensing fiber length of 15 km and a sampling rate of 10 MHz. It is proven that the distributed optical fiber sensing technology based on the dual Sagnac interferometer system has high practical application value.

Keywords

• long-distance optical fiber sensing
• dual Sagnac interferometers
• polarization compensation module
• location accuracy