BOTDA sensing system employing a tunable low-cost Brillouin fiber ring laser pump-probe source

In this paper we show a Brillouin optical time-domain analysis (BOTDA) sensing system experiment employing a tunable narrow-linewidth dual pump-probe source based on modified Brillouin ring laser technology. The developed cost-effective source generates a tunable pump-locked probe light, with suitable wavelength shift, large tuning range (~200 MHz), narrow linewidth (<;2.5 MHz) and adequate power (~0.5 mW). The developed source was hence employed in BOTDA system experiments providing distributed sensing over ~10 km single mode optical fiber, and attaining strain and temperature resolutions of ~10με and ~0.5°C respectively, indicating the pump-probe source as an efficient and cost-effective solution for BOTDA avoiding high-frequency signal generators or complex locking techniques.