An Energy Demodulation Based Fiber Optic Sensing System for Landslide Early-Warning

To help reduce the impact of geo-hazards, an innovative landslide early-warning technology based on an energy demodulation-based fiber optic sensing (FOS-LW for short) technology, is introduced in this paper. FOS-LW measures the energy change in a sensing fiber at the segment of micro-bending, which can be caused by landslide movements, and automatically raises an alarm as soon as the measured signal intensity in the fiber reaches a pre-set threshold. Based on the sensing of micro-bending losses in the fiber optics, a two-event sensing algorithm has been developed for the landslide early-warning. The feasibility of the FOS-LW technology is verified through laboratory simulation and field tests. The result shows that FOS-LW has some unique features—such as the graded alarm, real-time responses, remote monitoring, low cost and passive optical network—and can be applied in the early-warning of landslides.