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US 9,435,668 B2Granted
Fibre optic distributed sensing
AssigneeOptasense Holdings Limited
InventorsAndrew Biggerstaff Lewis, Stuart John Russell
Life of this patent
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AssigneeOptasense Holdings Limited
InventorsAndrew Biggerstaff Lewis, Stuart John Russell
Estimating the term…
The application describes methods and apparatus for distributed fiber sensing, especially distributed acoustic/strain sensing. The method involves launching interrogating radiation in to an optical fiber and sampling radiation backscattered from within said fiber at a rate so as to acquire a plurality of samples corresponding to each sensing portion of interest. The plurality of samples are divided into separate processing channels and processed to determine a phase value for that channel. A quality metric is then applied to the processed phase data and the data combined to provide an overall phase value for the sensing portion based on the quality metric. The quality metric may be a measure of the degree of similarity of the processed data from the channels. The interrogating radiation may comprise two relatively narrow pulses separated by a relatively wide gap and the sampling rate may be set such that a plurality of substantially independent diversity samples are acquired.
A distributed fibre optic sensor apparatus comprising:
A distributed fibre optic sensor apparatus as claimed in 10 wherein the processor is configured such that phase data from channels which are similar to one another are given higher weightings than processed phase values that are less similar to one another.
A method of distributed fibre optic sensing comprising:
A method of processing data acquired from a distributed fibre optic sensor to determine any phase modulation comprising the steps of:
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.