Recent Progress in Fast Distributed Brillouin Optical Fiber Sensing

Brillouin-based optical fiber sensing has been regarded as a good distributed measurement tool for the modern large geometrical structure and the industrial facilities because it can demodulate the distributed environment information (e.g., temperature and strain) along the sensing fiber. Brillouin optical time domain analysis (BOTDA), which is an excellent and attractive scheme, has been widely developed thanks to its high performance in a signal-to-noise ratio, a spatial resolution, and sensing distance. However, the sampling rate of the classical BOTDA is severely limited by several factors (especially the serially frequency-sweeping process) so that it cannot be suitable for the quickly distributed measurement. In this work, we summarize some promising breakthroughs about the fast BOTDA, which can be named as an optical frequency comb technique, an optical frequency-agile technique, a slope-assisted technique, and an optical chirp chain technique.