Specialty Fiber Technology for Brillouin Optical Time Domain Analysis

Brillouin optical time domain analysis (BOTDA)Brillouin optical time domain analysis (BOTDA) is a powerful technique for measuring the temperature and strain distribution along an optical fiber using Brillouin scattering. It has offered many opportunities in various industries including structural health monitoring for civil infrastructure, oil and gas industry, geophysical exploration, environmental monitoring etc. As the technology of specialty fibersSpecialty fibers is continuously evolving, it is bringing new and enhanced opportunities for BOTDABOTDA applications by enabling new sensing capabilities and addressing specific challenges. For example, specialty fibersSpecialty fibers with special materials and/or special structures have been applied in BOTDABOTDA system to achieve enhanced sensor performance, including large scale strain sensing, temperature-insensitive strain sensing, high temperature strain sensing. These performance enhancements lead to many favourable applications, such as curvature sensing and shape reconstruction, discriminative sensing of temperature and strain. Multiplexed sensing systems have been developed to realize multipurpose sensing capabilities, such as hybrid Brillouin and Rayleigh sensing system, hybrid Brillouin and Raman sensing system. This book chapter introduces the fundamentals of utilization of unique properties of specialty fibersSpecialty fibers in BOTDABOTDA system and highlights specific applications. This book chapter could serve as a useful resource for researchers, engineers, and scientists working in the field of optical sensing and fiber optics.