A Novel Distributed Vibration Sensor Based on Fading Noise Reduction in Multi-Mode Fiber

Multi-mode fiber (MMF) is used in a polarization-sensitive optical time domain reflectometer (OTDR) for vibration event location and spectrum analysis. The vibration events acting on MMF are considered to be the optical polarization state and phase diversifying process for fading noise reduction. In addition, data averaging with continuous positions and the fast Fourier transform (FFT) method is proposed to extract the spectrum of the vibration events. In the experiment, the vibration events are loaded at the positions of 5.167 and 10.145 km, respectively, along MMF. The experimental results demonstrate that the vibration event can effectively diversify the optical polarization state and phase of the Rayleigh scattering light to make the averaged OTDR trace behind the vibration position converge rapidly, which helps to locate corresponding vibration events and extract the vibration spectrum. It is inferred that the new distributed vibration sensor shall have a lower false alarm rate, as it can greatly reduce the errors caused by randomness of the sensing light signals. Additionally, it also saves time in comparison with the method that analyzes the vibration spectra for all the positions along the fiber under test.