Distributed Optical Fibre Sensing

We design and develop novel optical fibre sensors capable of measuring temperature, strain, and vibration at thousands of points using a single strand of optical fibre. Such sensors have applications in wide range of fields from aerospace and civil engineering to geophysical sciences.

About

We design, develop, and test a class of sensing systems known as distributed optical fibre sensors (DOFSs). The distinctive property of such sensors is their ability to quantify measurands, such as temperature and strain, at tens of thousands of points along the entire length of a sensing fibre by analysing the backscattered light from one end of that fibre.

Our main research areas include:

High-resolution distributed acoustic sensing (H-DAS)
Distributed temperature sensing (DTS) based on photon counting
Long-range distributed acoustic sensing
Distributed shape sensing based on multi-core fibre

Once a new sensing concept is realised and evaluated in the lab, a robust optical interrogator is developed based on the optical arrangement to allow us to test the new sensing system in the field.

The optical interrogator is often used to carry out cross-disciplinary field tests in areas such as geophysics or civil engineering in collaboration with other research institutes such as ETH Zurich, Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC), Ateneo de Manila University, The Institute of Sound and Vibration Research (ISVR), British Telecom (BT), and the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), to name a few.