Study on the Efficiency of Temperature/Strain Measurement for Ultra-Long-Distance Optical Fiber Composite Overhead Power Transmission Lines

Featured Application This work can be applied to the monitoring of mountain fire, ice, lightning strikes, and galloping along the optical fiber composite overhead power transmission lines with ultra-long distances and large measurement ranges. The coherent optical time domain reflectometer (COTDR) is a very important instrument for distributed temperature/strain measurement along the sensing fiber with a large dynamic range and high accuracy. The length of the sensing fiber and the temperature/strain measurement range limit the system performance, especially the measurement efficiency. So, a COTDR system is constructed, and the characteristics of the obtained coherent Rayleigh noise (CRN) are analyzed. Then, in consideration of the temperature/strain measurement range, accuracy, and time efficiency, the temperature/strain demodulation algorithm in noise conditions is studied. With different noise coefficients, the array length with 11, 21, 31, 51, and 101 independent frequency sweeping points are adopted to calculate the cross-correlation coefficients along a standard reference array with 301 independent frequency sweeping points. The results demonstrate that the array length has little influence on the signal processing time, but it can decide the measurement accuracy. To balance the system measurement efficiency and accuracy, it is inferred that, for a sensing fiber with a length of 100 km or more, the optimal independent frequency sweeping points are 101 and the trace average number is 1000.

Automated summary

This work introduces a significant instrument, the coherent optical time domain reflectometer (COTDR), for monitoring mountain fire, ice, lightning strikes, and long-distance optical fiber composite overhead power transmission lines. It analyzes the characteristics of coherent Rayleigh noise (CRN) and studies the temperature/strain demodulation algorithm in noise conditions. Based on different noise coefficients and independent frequency sweeping points, the optimal parameter choice for a sensing fiber with a length of 100 km or more is determined.