Advancing the measurement speed and accuracy of conventional BOTDA fiber sensor systems via SoC data acquisition

Brillouin optical time -domain analysis (BOTDA) systems are widely used in distributed sensing applications and play a major role in modern monitoring systems. However, BOTDA system suffers manual frequency scanning, offline data acquisition and processing and signal synchronisation, which results in time consuming for measurement and complexity of the system. To overcome these limitations and improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the system, we present a system -on -chip (SoC)-based BOTDA fiber sensor system that considerably enhances its measurement speed, accuracy and power consumption. In contrast to the conventional tools, the SoC-based BOTDA system used a synchronised auto scanning approach to achieve a measurement speed of approximately 100 times faster than the conventional. The SoC-based BOTDA system also demonstrated an average improvement of 52 % in dynamic temperature sensing ranges (45 degrees C, 50 degrees C, 55 degrees C, 60 degrees C and 65 degrees C), with a high constancy of 0.05 MHz/degrees C based on the average of six measurements for each temperature. Furthermore, the proposed system exhibited a confidence interval (CI) range of 1.24 MHz for the Brillouin frequency shift (BFS) resolution, indicating a high confidence in both BFS identification and temperature measurement. This improvement is attributed to the SoC's high stability in spatial resolution and measurement sensitivity. Additionally, the integration of SoC enables the incorporation of required electronic components, thus reducing the size and power consumption, leading to saving of approximately 98 % of power. Therefore, the proposed SoC-based BOTDA system in this study is a promising solution for distributed sensing applications that require high performance, low power consumption and compact size.