Self-Mixing Demodulation for Coherent Phase-Sensitive OTDR System

Phase-sensitive optical time domain reflectometry (Phi-OTDR) attracts much attention due to its capability of telling the type and position of an intrusion simultaneously. In recent decades, coherent Phi-OTDR has been demonstrated to realize long-distance detection. For coherent Phi-OTDR, there are three typical demodulation schemes in the reported studies. However, they still cannot realize real-time monitoring to satisfy practical demands. A simple and effective demodulation method based on self-mixing has been put forward to demodulate the beat signal in coherent Phi-OTDR. It not only saves a local electrical oscillator and frequency locked loop, but also demodulates the beat signal without residual frequency. Several vibrations with different frequency were separately applied at the same location of a 42.5 km fiber. The spatial resolution of 10 m and frequency response range from 8 Hz to 980 Hz have been achieved. The precise location with signal-to-noise ratio of 21.4 dB and broadband measurement demonstrate the self-mixing scheme can demodulate the coherent Phi-OTDR signal effectively.