Ingeniero Civil Electricista / Esta tesis presenta un resumen de las actividades, proyectos necesarios, implementación, resultados y discusión de éstos, para realizar una transferencia tecnológica de un sensor de deformaciones basado en la reflectometría óptica descrita por L. Brillouin. Este desarrollo se realiza en los laboratorios de la Nippon Telephone and Telegraph en los años 2002-2003 y es seleccionado para su transferencia hacia la minería a través de una nueva empresa Mining Information Communications and Monitoring , MICOMO S.A. creada para estos fines por la sociedad formada por CODELCO Chile y NTT. Para incorporar este tipo de tecnologías no probadas , ni existentes en el arsenal de las empresas de ingeniería que diseñan las explotaciones y plantas mineras, se hace necesario recorrer el largo camino del innovador, vendiendo los conceptos y realizando pilotos a nivel escritorio, a nivel industrial, contrastando durante largos periodos las mediciones de los nuevos métodos con las mediciones realizadas con instrumentación probada . Se hace necesario aclarar y establecer los ámbitos, rangos, operatividad, requerimientos de instalación, mantención y ambiente y, obtener la aprobación de pares cuya prioridad es la producción de cobre o Mega Watts. Entre los resultados más destacables, cabe mencionar los siguientes: - Se miden por primera vez, a entender del autor, en la minería mundial deformaciones en línea y distribuidas del macizo rocoso sometido a una operación minera. Con estas mediciones se investigaron las influencias sobre las distintas estructuras instrumentadas de la actividad minera, se correlaciona la medición de deformaciones con la actividad micro-sísmica y se comienzan los estudios para analizar la dinámica actividad minera (extracción) versus deformación de una estructura, túnel, pilar de punto de extracción y la actividad micro-sísmica que precede o antecede al desplazamiento. - Se logra por primera vez en el mundo medir, establemente, pequeñas deformaciones de 3000 metros de estructura de un túnel de conducción de aguas a 100 metros de presión de agua y con flujos de 2 a 3 metros por segundo. - Se entrega a la operación minera e hidráulica global una herramienta para medir, alarmar y posteriormente modelar un lazo de control de producción con la variable salubridad estructural como condicionante de esa producción.

This dissertation describes the work conducted on error analysis for Brillouin Optical Time Domain Reflectometry (BOTDR), a distributed strain sensing technology used for monitoring the structural performance of infrastructures. Although BOTDR has been recently applied to many infrastructure monitoring applications, its measurement error has not yet been thoroughly investigated. The challenge to accurately monitor structures using BOTDR sensors lies in the fact that the measurement error is dependent on the noise and the spatial resolution of the sensor as well as the non-uniformity of the monitored infrastructure strain conditions. To improve the reliability of this technology, measurement errors (including precision error and systematic error) need to be carefully investigated through fundamental analysis, lab testing, numerical modelling, and real site monitoring verification. The relationship between measurement error and sensor characteristics is firstly studied experimentally and theoretically. In the lab, different types of sensing cables are compared with regard to their measurement errors. Influences of factors including fibre diameters, polarization and cable jacket on measurement error are characterized. Based on experimental characterization results, an optics model is constructed to simulate the Brillouin back scattering process. The basic principle behind this model is the convolution between the injected pulse and the intrinsic Brillouin spectrum. Using this model, parametric studies are conducted to theoretically investigate the impacts of noise, frequency step and spectrum bandwidth on final strain measurement error. The measurement precision and systematic error are then investigated numerically and experimentally. Measurement results of field sites with installed optical fibres displayed that a more complicated strain profile leads to a larger measurement error. Through extensive experimental and numerical verifications using a Brillouin Optical Time Domain Reflectometry (BOTDR), the dependence of precision error and systematic error on input strain were then characterized in the laboratory and the results indicated that a) the measurement precision error can be predicted using analyzer frequency resolution and the location determination error and b) the characteristics of the measurement systematic error can be described using the error to strain gradient curve. This is significant because for current data interpretation process, data quality is supposed to be constant along the fibre although the monitored strain for most of the site cases is non-uniformly distributed, which is verified in this thesis leading to a varying data quality. A novel data quality quantification method is therefore proposed as a function of the measured strain shape. Although BOTDR has been extensively applied in infrastructure monitoring in the past decade, their data interpretation has been proven to be nontrivial, due to the nature of field monitoring. Based on the measurement precision and systematic error characterization results, a novel data interpretation methodology is constructed using the regularization decomposing method, taking advantages of the measured data quality. Experimental results indicate that this algorithm can be applied to various strain shapes and levels, and the accuracy of the reconstructed strain can be greatly improved. The developed algorithm is finally applied to real site applications where BOTDR sensing cables were implemented in two load bearing piles to monitor the construction loading and ground heaving processes.

Distributed fibre optic sensing (DFOS) is essential for structural health monitoring (SHM) of strain changes induced during the lifetime of a structure. Among different DFOS systems, the Brillouin Optical Time Domain Reflectometry (BOTDR) takes the advantages of obtaining full frequency spectrum to provide strain and temperature information along the optic fibre. The key parameters of distributed fibre optic sensors, spatial and frequency resolution, are strongly linked with the time-frequency (T-F) localisation in the system in three parts: pulse, hardware design and optical fibre. T-F localization is fundamentally important for the communication system, whereas in this study the importance of the T-F localisation to the spatial and frequency resolution, repeatability and the measurement speed are introduced in BOTDR. In this dissertation, the development of DFOS is first introduced, including both traditional methods and new developed designs. The literature review shows the signal to noise ratio (SNR) of BOTDR can be improved by investigating its T-F localisation. In the hardware design, in order to improve the T-F localisation in hardware architecture, a Short-Time Fourier Transform-Brillouin Optical Time-Domain Reflectometry (STFT-BOTDR), which implements STFT over the full frequency spectrum to measure the distributed temperature and strain along the optic fibre, is applied so that the conventional frequency sweeping method can be replaced for high resolution and fast speed measurement, providing new research advances in dynamic distributed sensing. The STFT based BOTDR has better T-F localisation, which in turn provides an opportunity for off-line post signal processing that is more adaptable for fast speed measurements. The spatial and frequency resolution of dynamic BOTDR sensing is limited by the Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) and the T-F localization of the input pulse shape. The T-F localized input pulse shape can enhance the SNR and the spatial and frequency resolution in STFT-BOTDR. In this study, simulation and experiments of T-F localized different pulses shapes are conducted to examine the limitation of the system resolution. The result indicates that a rectangular pulse should be selected to optimize the spatial resolution and a Lorentzian pulse could be chosen to optimize the frequency resolution, while a Gaussian shape pulse can be used in general applications for its balanced performance in both spatial and frequency resolution. Meanwhile, T-F localization is used for pulse T-F localisation optimisation. A set of Kaiser-Bessel functions is used to simulate different pulse shapes and to compare their parameters in terms of T-F localisation and their Brillouin scattering spectrum. A method using an iterative filtering algorithm to achieve the optimised pulse in terms of T-F localisation is introduced to converge the Effective-pulse Width (TEW) in the time-domain and Effective-pulse Linewidth (FEL) in the frequency domain to identify the fundamental limitations. The optimised pulse can be fitted with a 7th order Gaussian (super-Gaussian) shape and it offers the best experimental performance compared to a Rectangular pulse. The sensitivity of a sensor to strain or temperature variations due to distributed Brillouin scattering is closely related to the power distribution on the Brillouin scattering spectrum which is related to the property of the optic fibre. The performance of a highly nonlinear fibre that can generate a higher Brillouin scattering signal is compared to that of a standard single mode fibre. The results show that much higher SNR of the Brillouin scattering spectrum and smaller frequency uncertainties in the sensing measurement can be achieved by using a highly nonlinear fibre for comparable launched powers. With a measurement speed of 4 Hz, the frequency uncertainty can be 0.43 MHz, corresponding to 10 με in strain or 0.43°C in temperature uncertainty for the tested highly nonlinear fibre. In contrast, for a standard single mode fibre, the value would increase to about 1.02 MHz (25 με or 1.02°C), demonstrating the advantage of the tested highly nonlinear fibre for distributed strain/temperature sensing. Results show that, by using a small effective area highly nonlinear fibre, the strain or temperature resolution can be improved because it generates stronger Brillouin scattering signal with high SNR and high Q factor spectrum, both of which determine the optimal averaging time in a single measurement. In general, the STFT-BOTDR can achieve 1 m spatial resolution, 10 με frequency resolution on a 10 km fibre with measurement speed at about 2.5 kHz.