The infrastructure for fibre optic sensors has expanded extensively, with a great potential for more efficiently conducting sensing tasks but also carrying data in parallel. However, their use for sensing is very limited due to a lack of supporting technologies. The EU-funded SoFiN project will address current challenges and carry out research to utilise fibre optic sensors for sensing systems, providing great benefits throughout the already installed and extensive fibre infrastructure. To achieve this, the project team will develop an innovative sensor platform along with novel laser types and processing units, all connected to a centralized software monitoring platform, employing intelligent technologies to be newly developed as part of this research project.
The project is based on three key strategic objectives. First is the development of an adaptive, modular and highly integrated photonic multi-sensing system, capable for various sensing applications in a sensor network. This involves the technical design and further development of the flexible sensor platform that can be used for various fiber-based sensing applications. Second the parallel research and development of new types of digital signal processing and cloud connections of the sensor system. In brief this involves the novel signal processing concepts to improve sensing performance and integration of the sensor system into a cloud-based monitoring system. The third objective involves the validation and demonstration of the project developments under the context of end-user needs. For this objective, the system will be used in three typical application use cases to further study behaviour close to real world scenarios.
The uses cases included in the project are: 1) Supervision of powerlines where distributed temperature and acoustic sensing will be used to collect information on the status of powerlines. Also, it is planned to interrogate FBG (Fiber Bragg Grating) arrays to further demonstrate and validate the flexibility of the system. 2) Supervision of telecommunication where information will be collected from the system, on external impacts threatening the fiber infrastructure, e.g. fire, stress, heavy machinery in the perimeter of fiber cables that could risk fiber integrity. Investigations will be also performed to increase security of unmanned network sites. 3) Supervision of water supply network where distributed acoustic sensing will be used to detect leaks via changing sound generated by water flow, but also FBG array-based supervision to detect temperature and strain variation caused by lost water combined with methods of machine learning to detect water loss at an early stage.
