Breakthrough the physical barrier on spatial resolution in Raman distributed fiber sensing using chaotic correlation demodulation

Abstract

Raman distributed optical fiber temperature sensors possess the unique capability of measuring spatial environmental temperatures, which can be of great interest in several fields of application. The key physics barrier to spatial resolution for most optical time-domain reflection (OTDR) systems is the positioning principle of pulse-time-flight. It obtains the spatial resolution of the existing Raman distributed optical fiber temperature sensor, with the kilometer-level sensing distance being limited to the meter-level. Here, we propose a chaotic laser Raman distributed optical fiber temperature sensing scheme that replaces the traditional OTDR positioning principle used for more than 40 years with the chaotic correlation positioning principle. The proposed scheme possesses the characteristics of the chaos Raman scattering light excited by the chaos signal along the sensing fiber. A novel measurement mechanism based on chaotic time-domain differential reconstruction and chaotic correlation demodulation is developed, and a relationship between the temperature variation information and the chaotic correlation peak is experimentally demonstrated. Importantly, the proposed optics mechanism scheme overcomes the physics limitation of the effect of a wide pulse width on sensing spatial resolution; its spatial resolution is optimized from 50 to 0.3 m under the modulation of a 500 ns pulse width. This scheme provides a new concept for chaos optics and fiber sensing research.