Optical Fiber Distributed Acoustic Sensors: A Review

Fiber-optic distributed acoustic sensor (DAS) is one of the most attractive and promising fiber-optic sensing technologies in the recent decade. It can simultaneously detect and retrieve multiple vibrations over a long distance, and the high sampling rate provides abundant information of the environment. This article reviews the principles involved in DAS system, including three types of reflectometry to locate the Rayleigh backscattering (RBS) along the fiber, and the methods to recover the vibration waveform by the phase or spectrum of RBS. The technologies and recent progresses on DAS systems are introduced, and two kinds of typical applications of DAS are reviewed. Finally, the possible research trends are discussed.