Distributed Fiber-Optic Sensing on Infrastructure Installations

Date: 4/24/2019

Time: 06:00 PM

Room: Fifth Avenue

Distributed Fiber-optic Sensing interrogator units can utilize either already existing or temporarily deployed fiber-optic cables to sense ground motion or subsurface strain. To date the main applications for DAS have focused on oil and gas reservoir monitoring and pipeline integrity monitoring. In general, infrastructure has telecommunication grade fiber optic cables embedded for a variety of other primary purposes. These cables can be interrogated to obtain information about the surrounding or the subsurface medium. The coupling of the fiber to the medium is often highly variable, manifesting itself in spatially variable stain transduction onto the fiber. A strain tensor projection as part of the more complicated transfer function. However, the transfer function is typically highly consistent over time for a given spatial location. Such transduction models are focus of ongoing research in the community. We will be showing a variety of data examples where we observed small, regional or tele-seismic earthquakes, as well as fluid and wind flow patterns across an infrastructure embedded fiber onshore and offshore. DAS as a passive photonic sensing system has the advantage that power is needed only at the interrogator location, while the fiber providing the sensor locations can be placed in hostile environments and left on site indefinitely. In contrast to point sensors telemetering their data back to a central collection site, the large number of fiber-based sensors (thousands to tens of thousands on a single fiber) lend itself to multi-channel processing techniques which can be provided on site as part of the interrogation system. This fits the edge computing model, where compute intensive analysis is performed locally near-real-time with relevant data and results are collected centrally.

Presenting Author: Martin Karrenbach

Authors