A Distributed Fiber Sensing System for Acoustic Emission and Vibration of Power Equipment

Vibration and acoustic signals are important for the assessment of health of the power equipment. Piezoelectric sensors, often working as accelerometer or acoustic transducer, were often employed in application of vibration and acoustic detection. However, the advancement of fiber optic sensor made them increasingly popular among the monitoring application within power grid recently. Fiber optic sensor can provide several advantages, such as its immunity to external electromagnetic interference, compatibility to the insulation material within power equipment, and its potential capability of distributed sensing. In this research, we constructed a fiber optic sensor prototype to test its applicability in detection of vibration and acoustic emission of power equipment. Four fiber coils were concatenated in one fiber sensing arm so several spatial locations can be detected by this fiber optic sensor. Besides, we developed a signal demodulation scheme to try to recover and locate the signal along the fiber sensing arm.