Demonstration and potential of distributed temperature sensors using the frequency derived technique

A forward scattering scheme for temperature sensing based on the optical Kerr effect in a polarisation maintaining optical fibre is demonstrated. Theory and experimental measurements show that this frequency derived technique is promising for temperature measurement. A good theoretical understanding of the fundamental signal and noise levels has been achieved and these show that useful combinations of system range and spatial resolution may be achieved with signal-to-noise performance exceeding that of OTDR-based systems. However further work is needed to quantify overall system performance when practical signal processing techniques are adopted