Coherent optical frequency domain reflectometry for interrogation of microbend- and macrobend- based fiber optic hydrocarbon sensors

The paper presents distributed fiber optic bending sensor for petroleum hydrocarbon detection based on COFDR technique. Sensitive polymer, which effectively swells under hydrocarbon influence, was employed in order to introduce bending losses in hydrocarbon presence. In this work we used lumped reflectors, namely fiber Bragg gratings, placed between distributed sensitive elements. Proposed design of the sensor utilises the principle of truly distributed detection with discrete localisation of perturbation. We have demonstrated that the COFDR technique with bending based chemical sensor is capable to detect hydrocarbon presence within a few minutes for 20-cm perturbation-length with spatial resolution up to 0.5 meters.