Fast Brillouin optical time domain analysis for dynamic sensing

A new technique for the fast implementation of Brillouin Optical Time Domain Analysis (BOTDA) is proposed and demonstrated, carrying the classical BOTDA method to the dynamic sensing domain. By using a digital signal generator which enables fast switching among 100 scanning frequencies, we demonstrate a truly distributed and dynamic measurement of a 100m long fiber with a sampling rate of similar to 10kHz, limited only by the fiber length and the frequency granularity. With 10 averages the standard deviation of the measured strain was similar to 5 mu epsilon. (C) 2012 Optical Society of America