| Brillouin Optical Time Domain Analysis (BOTDA) has become of greater commercial interest over the past 10 years, resulting in the emergence of several new commercial products and the pursuit of new applications.;The outcomes of this thesis are threefold: Firstly, significant contributions to a cost-and-size-reduced portable BOTDA system were delivered, including the design, fabrication and testing of a custom optical-to-digital conversion printed circuit board, and the development of firmware, software, and field programmable gate array hardware description language code. This system is much more suitable for field measurements and commercialization than the existing lab-based system at UNB.;Secondly, a distributed temperature measurement of a watercourse was performed to demonstrate the relevancy of this technology for hydrologic, hydrogeologic and biologic applications. This includes the identification of watercourse features such as temperature, hyporheic zones, and confluences.;Thirdly, a novel means of flow measurement was developed and performed using BOTDA techniques. A heated fibre was temporarily installed in a borehole and used to detect regions of flow. Although the system failed prematurely, regions of flow in the borehole were identified and compared with other measurements. This technique can find applications in hydrogeology and the petroleum industry. |
