As one of the most important physical parameters of seawater, salinity is essential to study climatological change, to trace seawater masses and to model ocean dynamics. The traditional way to conduct salinity measurement in hydrographical observation is to use a standard conductivity-temperature-depth (CTD) probe where the salinity determination is based on a measurement of electrical conductivity. This article describes some developments of recent years that could lead to a new generation of instruments for the determination of salinity in seawater. Salinity determination with optical salinity sensor based on the refractive index measurement have been extensively studied. Different ways to conduct refractive index measurements are summarized, including measurements based on beam deviation, light wave mode coupling and swelling of surface coating material, among which the optical fiber sensors are promising candidates for further commercialization. Complementary to the above-mentioned direct measurement salinity point sensors, seismic observation takes advantages of large scale multichannel seismic data to retrieve the ocean salinity with high lateral resolution of ∼10 m. This work provide comprehensive information in the techniques related to the marine salinity measurement.

This study proposes two new fiber optic interferometric accelerometers with the utilization of the push-pull structure, one is based on the principle of triple low-reflectivity fiber Bragg gratings, and the other is based on the 1x3 unbalanced Michelson interferometer. The proposed accelerometers are capable of suppressing the common-mode noises (CMNs) by themselves without additional reference accelerometers, and therefore reducing the volume and the cost of the sensing system. Besides, the accelerometers can also suppress the sensor noises caused by the environment, and therefore show better CMNs suppression effect than the traditional method of using the reference accelerometer. The two accelerometers are experimentally verified and show respectively an improvement of 33 dB and 28 dB in CMNs suppression at 100 Hz. Both presented fiber optic accelerometers show huge advantages for the large-scale quasi-distributed oil and gas reservoir monitoring applications.

Fading noise is a crucial problem in distributed acoustic sensor (DAS) system which can severely degrade the system’s ability on distributed detection. In this paper, we systematically studied the mechanism and characteristics of fading noise in dual-pulse heterodyne demodulated DAS system. Results show that fading noise not only causes big fading errors in signal, but also leads to amplitude distortion of seismic wave. We propose the sort and average over trace (SAOT) algorithm to eliminate the fading noise of DAS data. After implementation of the algorithm on the simulated DAS data, the big fading error can be eliminated 100%, and the residual standard deviation can be reduced by 32 dB. Meanwhile, the correlation between the processed data and the noise-free data is improved by 29 dB. Then the performance of the algorithm is further verified by laboratory experiment, achieving a residual standard deviation reduction of 33 dB. Finally, the algorithm can perfectly eliminate the fading noise in vertical seismic profile (VSP) DAS data and surface seismic DAS data obtained at the oilfield site.

Phase fading is fatal to the performance of distributed acoustic sensors (DASs) influencing its capability of distributed measurement as well as its noise level. Here, we report the experimental observation of a strong negative correlation between the relative power spectrum density (PSD) at the heterodyne frequency and the noise floor of the detected phase for the heterodyne demodulated distributed acoustic sensor (HD-DAS) system. We further propose a weighted-channel stack algorithm (WCSA) to alleviate the phase fading noise via an enhancement of the relative PSD at the heterodyne frequency. Experimental results show that the phase noise of the demodulated signal can be suppressed by 13.7 dB under optimal condition. As a potential application, we exploited the improved HD-DAS system to retrieve a piece of music lasted for 205 s, demonstrating the reliability of detecting wideband sound signal without distortion.

This study proposes a high-accuracy transient response fiber optic seismic accelerometer based on the resonance suppression mechanism. A shock-absorbing ring is embedded in the accelerometer structure, which acts as a mechanical antiresonator. The experimental results show that the sensitivity at the resonance frequency is suppressed by 21.79 dB, and the 3 dB operating bandwidth is extended without reducing the average sensitivity. Under this condition, the high-accuracy transient response is obtained during the vibration-event test. This study provides a practical seismic acquisition technique solution for vertical seismic profiling monitoring in the smart oilfield.