Ultra-long high-sensitivity Φ-OTDR for high spatial resolution intrusion detection of pipelines

An ultra-long phase-sensitive optical time domain reflectometry (Phi-OTDR) that can achieve high-sensitivity intrusion detection over 131.5km fiber with high spatial resolution of 8m is presented, which is the longest Phi-OTDR reported to date, to the best of our knowledge. It is found that the combination of distributed Raman amplification with heterodyne detection can extend the sensing distance and enhances the sensitivity substantially, leading to the realization of ultra-long Phi-OTDR with high sensitivity and spatial resolution. Furthermore, the feasibility of applying such an ultra-long Phi-OTDR to pipeline security monitoring is demonstrated and the features of intrusion signal can be extracted with improved SNR by using the wavelet detrending/denoising method proposed. (C) 2014 Optical Society of America