Strain Dynamic Range Enlargement of Slope-Assisted BOTDA by Using Brillouin Phase-Gain Ratio

A novel technique to enlarge the dynamic range of strain measurement for slope-assisted Brillouin optical time domain analysis (SA-BOTDA) is proposed by introducing a new parameter called Brillouin phase-gain ratio, which combines Brillouin phase shift and Brillouin gain. With the new technique, the dynamic range of strain measurement can be enlarged, and the pump-power-dependency problem mitigated. In the experiment, a 100-MHz frequency span of linear slope is demonstrated with a 25-ns pump pulse, which is 3.3 times of that in conventional SA-BOTDA, and a dynamic strain with a large amplitude of about 1000 με is successfully measured.