Publication:

Contributions to the development of Brillouin distributed sensors for structural health monitoring

The main objectives of this thesis is to contribute to the enhancement of the performance of distributed optical ber sensors (DOFS) based on stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) by analyzing their limitations and proposing solutions to overcome their current constraints. The dissertation has been focused on improving different aspects of dynamic and static Brillouin optical time-domain analysis (BOTDA) and Brillouin optical coherent-domain analysis (BOCDA) sensors. Moreover, this research work has tried to contribute to reduce the existing gap between the investigation of DOFS and their industrial applications, demonstrating the capability of these sensors to provide efficient and valuable measurements in real application scenarios. In particular, the objectives of this dissertation are: -Enhance the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) constraints faced by of BOTDA sensors by proposing alternative setups or post-processing solutions to achieve better performance. -Analyze and study the dynamic self-heterodyne detection BOTDA sensor recently presented by our research group to try to improve its performance by proposing solutions to their constraints and alternative setups. -Research on the limitations of a particular single-ended access BOCDA sensor setup with the aim of enhancing its performance. -Design, develop and implement novel measuring systems to deploy the investigated DOFS in real applications and demonstrate their capabilities.