Development and applications of the distributed temperature and strain sensors based on Brillouin scattering

An automated distributed sensor system based on Brillouin scattering has been developed for temperature and strain measurement. This system can provide centimetre spatial resolution for simultaneous temperature and strain sensing with strain accuracy of 10-30 /spl mu//spl epsiv/ and temperature accuracy of 1-2/spl deg/C using polarization maintained fibres (PMF) and photonic crystal fibres (PCF). We used this sensor to detect a 1.5 cm crack in an optical ground wire.