Software Design And Implementation Of Brillouin Optical Time Domain Reflectometer

The distributed optical fiber sensing technique not only has the advantages of conventional optical fiber sensing technique, such as anti-radiation, anti-electromagnetic and good stability, but also can be applied to distributed monitoring the structure with the common communication optical fiber. Therefore, the technique has many applications in large structure safety monitoring. Brillouin Optical Time Domain Reflectometer, which has features of large sensing range, high accuracy, can be used to measure the strain, temperature and loss of the arbitrary location along the test fiber. Therefore, BOTDR has gained worldwide extensively attention.In this paper, Brillouin Optical Time Domain Reflectometer is analyzed theoretically. And the experimental data is acquired and processed by the software system. The system of human-computer interaction, data acquisition, and other functions can be completed by computers. The software system is developed based on the development platform—LabVIEW, which is used to achieve a friendly human-computer interaction, simple and intuitive control, safe and reliable monitoring functions. The hardware system is composed by the optical components, such as the microwave module, the signal gain control module and data acquisition module. The PC monitoring system controls the BOTDR’s hardware system through the corresponding interface. And it provides powerful data acquisition capabilities. Proposed by the BOTDR software system design, it can accomplish the optical path and circuit real-time control precisely and also achieve real-time monitoring of operation state.The software system based on Brillouin Optical Time Domain Reflectometer technology can realize the temperature and strain measurements of an11km length of optical fiber, and give out the real-time measured data and analysis. The results of experiment show that the system works stability and security and meets the expected design.