DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRICAL AND ELECTRONICS ENGINEERING

EE492 PROJECT MIDTERM REPORT

DEVELOPMENT OF A SIMULATION TOOL

FOR OPTICAL FIBER VIBRATION SENSOR

ŞAMİL ŞİRİN
220206004

Assist. Prof. Kıvılcım YÜKSEL ALDOĞAN

DATE: 05/04/2019
1 General Description
In distributed vibration or temperature sensing applications, optical
fiber-based sensors are commonly used due to their series of advantages.
The underlying principle of distributed fiber optic vibration sensors is mea-
surement of backscattering signals generated due to inhomogeneities in the
core while laser pulse coupled into the fiber is propagating. According to the
properties like the interrogation domain (time or frequency), scattering type
(Rayleigh, Raman, Brillouin). . . etc., interrogation techniques differ [1]. In
distributed acoustic sensing applications, among various interrogation tech-
niques, phase-sensitive optical time domain reflectometry (Phase OTDR)
is subjected to many significant researches due to its ability to locate and
characterize more than one vibration at the same time, recently [2].
The vibration applied on a section of fiber under test (FUT) changes
relative positions of inhomogeneities so that variation in optical path length
of backscattered signals causes a relative change in both amplitude and
phase of Rayleigh backscattered signals (RBS). In Phase OTDR technique,
highly coherent source is used to increase phase sensitivity since the rela-
tionship between magnitude of vibration and the phase shift of RBS is linear
[3]. Nonetheless, the magnitude change of RBS due to vibration is not lin-
early related to the amplitude of RBS, so to detect magnitude of the strain,
many phase extraction techniques i.e. coherent detection [4], interferometric
structure [5], I/Q demodulation [6] . . . etc. are proposed in the literature. In
the previous semester, a Phase-OTDR simulator tool was developed with a
phase extraction scheme based on Imbalanced Mach-Zehnder Interferometer
(IMZI). However, interference of RBS which increases the phase sensitivity
allows us to fully characterize the vibration causes RBS intensity trace to
be randomly jagged due to random nature of distribution of scatterers. In
Figure 1, points with extremely low RBS intensities can be observed due to
the interference fading which restrains spatial resolution over a long FUT.
As an alternative, optical frequency domain reflectometry (OFDR) offers a
higher spatial resolution [7]. In this technique, laser source is chirped and
split into two by a coupler. Light in one arm is launched into the fiber
while the other one is used as reference (called local oscillator). RBS from
FUT mixed with the reference signal and their interference produces a beat
signal whose frequency is mapped to the positions of reflections along FUT.
Therefore, the duration of laser chirp should compromise the time needed
for RBS from the far end of FUT to reach photodetector. This means for
long measured-distances, the duration of laser chirp should be high enough.
Additionally, to suppress phase noise of the laser, also laser chirp rate must

1
 Figure 1: Jagged trace of distance along fiber vs. RBS intensity

be high. However, high laser chirp rate and duration increase the beat sig-
nal frequency which should not go beyond the sampling rate. The trade-off
between the laser phase noise and measurable distance range limits OFDR
to be used for long-distance measurements.
In this paper, time-gated digital optical frequency domain reflectometry
(TGD-OFDR) would be examined since it promises a much-improved SNR
together with an increased spatial resolution and dynamic range. The aim
of the project is to adapt this technique to our currently developed Phase-
OTDR simulation tool.

2 Current Status
Our present simulator, coded in MATLAB, models the the sensing sys-
tem as separate modules: - The interrogating fiber consists of equally divided
intervals where each one has only one scattering center with a uniformly dis-
tributed random position in its interval and a Rayleigh distributed random
size with a scale parameter which is determined by the number of scattering
centers that can be comprised by the resolution cell at once [8].
- A frequency-stable and highly coherent pulse was modelled for different
options of pulse shapes.
- Backscattered electric field (BEF) was modelled regarding the effect of
external perturbations. Additionally, when only a part of the probe pulse is
in the perturbed area, its effect on BEF also is considered.
- Besides the photodetectors (PD), Imbalanced Mach-Zehnder Interferome-
ter (IMZI) was used in phase detection.

2
Figure 2: Schematic diagram of the TGD-OFDR system. FG: function
generator; AOM: acousto-optic modulator; BPD: balanced photo detector;
A/D: analog-to-digital convertor; PC: personal computer.[10]

- Phase was extracted from the output of PD by signal processing according

to the algorithm in [9].

3 A Novel Vibration Sensing Method: Time-gated

Digital Optical Frequency Domain Reflectometry
Different from the classical OFDR system, in TGD-OFDR, duration of
the laser chirp is gated into a narrow time window, hence length of FUT
does not affect the chirp duration and so beat frequency. Besides, only the
launched part of laser into the FUT is chirped. Then, since the reference
beam remains frequency stable, frequency-distance mapping in TGD-OFDR
is done digitally with an equivalent reference to the chirped local oscillator.
As seen in the Figure 2, signal produced by the laser is split into 2 beams.
Upper beam is linearly chirped by Acousto-Optical Modulator (AOM) with
rate of γ and time-gated within duration of pulse, τp as seen in Figure 3.
Resulting electric field of a pulse after AOM is written as follows:
t
EP (t) = E0 rect( )exp{jωt + jπγt2 } (1)
τp

where E0 is the electric field magnitude and ω is the initial frequency.

As the pulse propagates along the FUT, there will be RBS from different
positions with different delays with respect to the local oscillator whose

3
Figure 3: Chirped probe pulse with chirp range∆f and gated within τp [10].

electric field with amplitude Eloc is given by

EL (t) = Eloc exp{jωt} (2)

RBS receiving photodetector simultaneously at time instant t can be

written by using equation 1 as a sum of backscattered signals from each
scattering center that is enclosed by the rectangular window function:
N
X t − τi
Es (t) = E0 ai ri rect( )exp{jω(t − τi ) + jπγ(t − τi )2 } (3)
τp
i=1

where N is the total number of scattering centers in FUT, ai is the atten-

uation constant, τi is the time delay with respect to the local osciallator
and ri = |ri |ejθi is the complex reflection coefficient related to ith scattering
center. Then, at the photodetector, measured intensity of the mixture of
the backscattered and reference signals whose electric fields were given by
equations 3 and 2 respectively is represented by the following equations [11]:
∗
i(t) ∝ Re{Es (t) · EL (t)} (4)
N
X t − τi
= E0 Eloc ai ri rect( )exp{−jωτi + jπγ(t − τi )2 }, (5)
τp
i=1

In conventional OFDR system, reference signal is also chirped to retrieve

reflection information in the same rate, but in TGD-OFDR, its equivalent
reference Sref is generated in signal processing. Frequency to distance map-
ping is realized using the fact that the frequency difference shown with pink
dotted line in Figure 4 between the received signal (shown with blue line)
and equivalent reference signal (shown with red line) is proportional to the
corresponding time delay τi . However, equivalent reference signal should

4
 Figure 4: Frequencies of two equivalent references and beat signals [11]

also be sampled with the same rate as beat signal, which restricts maxi-
mum frequency fmax that it can reach. Therefore, more than one equivalent
reference signals can be needed if the maximum round trip time of FUT is
longer than the maximum duration of one equivalent signal τs = fmax /γ.

4 Planned Project Tasks

Numerical model for TGD-OFDR was explained in the Method part
for static conditions. It will be improved by adding the effect of external
vibration to the system.
The simulator tool developed in the last semester will be used to build a
new one for the proposed technique. Probe Pulse module will be updated
to generate chirped pulses. Also, equivalent reference signals will be added
to the model considering the limitations of fmax and τs as mentioned above.
Then finally, the simulation results will be compared to the literature.

5 References
[1] M. Wuilpart, “Advanced Fiber Optics: Concepts and Technology,”
in Advanced Fiber Optics: Concepts and Technology, ch. Rayleigh-b,
EPFL Press, 2011.

[2] K. Y. Aldogan, “Rayleigh-based Optical Reflectometry Techniques for

Distributed Sensing Applications,” International Conference on Engi-
neering Technologies, pp. 290–292, 2018.

5
 [3] J. C. Juarez, E. W. Maier, K. N. Choi, and H. F. Taylor, “Distributed
Fiber-Optic Intrusion Sensor System,” Journal of Lightwave Technol-
ogy, vol. 23, no. 6, pp. 2081–2087, 2005.

[4] Y. Lu, T. Zhu, L. Chen, and X. Bao, “Distributed Vibration Sensor

Based on Coherent Detection of Phase-OTDR,” Journal of Lightwave
Technology, vol. 28, no. 22, pp. 3243–3249, 2010.

[5] A. Masoudi and T. P. Newson, “Analysis of distributed optical fibre

acoustic sensors through numerical modelling,” Optics Express, vol. 25,
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[6] Z. Pan, K. Liang, Q. Ye, H. Cai, R. Qu, and Z. Fang, “Phase-sensitive

OTDR system based on digital coherent detection,” Optical Sensors
and Biophotonics, vol. 8311, no. 8, p. 83110S, 2011.

[7] B. J. Soller, D. K. Gifford, M. S. Wolfe, and M. E. Froggatt, “High

resolution optical frequency domain reflectometry for characterization
of components and assemblies,” Optics Express, vol. 13, no. 2, p. 666,
2005.

[8] L. B. Liokumovich, N. A. Ushakov, O. I. Kotov, M. A. Bisyarin, and

A. H. Hartog, “Fundamentals of Optical Fiber Sensing Schemes Based
on Coherent Optical Time Domain Reflectometry: Signal Model under
Static Fiber Conditions,” Journal of Lightwave Technology, vol. 33,
no. 17, pp. 3660–3671, 2015.

[9] D. A. Brown, C. Cameron, R. M. Keolian, D. L. Gardner, and S. L.

Garrett, “A symmetric 33 coupler based demodulator for fiber optic
interferometric sensors,” SPIE, vol. 1584, 1991.

[10] Q. Liu, X. Fan, and Z. He, “Time-gated digital optical frequency do-
main reflectometry with 16-m spatial resolution over entire 110-km
range,” Optics Express, vol. 23, no. 20, p. 25988, 2015.

[11] D. Chen, Q. Liu, and Z. He, “Phase-detection distributed fiber-

optic vibration sensor without fading-noise based on time-gated digital
OFDR,” Optics Express, vol. 25, no. 7, p. 8315, 2017.