GAMBIT PROJECT

Summary:

Since it has been reported that more than 90% of the heat energy accumulation in the climate of the last 50 years has been in the ocean, monitoring climate change patterns of the ocean equates monitoring climate change itself, as the ocean plays a critical role in determining the climate of the planet. GAMBIT’s project aims to help in this research area by improving chirped-pulse phase-sensitive optical time reflectometry (CP- ФOTDR). This technology is a high-performance distributed fibre sensing technology, initially developed in the context of dynamic strain fibre sensing. GAMBIT seeks to fundamentally understand and redesign CP-ФOTDR operation, aiming to supress noise accumulated over time and achieve long-term high-sensitivity real-time distributed fibre temperature measurements, metric resolutions over 10’s-100 km of fibre. Such result would allow for a sensor with technical characteristics/specifications that currently doesn’t exist in the market by any technology (distributed fibre sensor or otherwise). The proposed sensor has the potential to disrupt several research areas which are currently limited by the instrumentation available.

General objective:

GAMBIT seeks to fundamentally understand and redesign CP- ФOTDR operation, aiming to supress noise accumulated over time and achieve long-term high-sensitivity measurements, compatible with operation over 10’s-100 km of fibre. The results will allow to APL to obtain a marketable prototype with technical characteristics/specifications that currently doesn’t exist in the market by any technology (distributed fibre sensor or otherwise).