Infrared and Laser Engineering, Volume. 54, Issue 4, 20250095(2025)

Recent advances of optical fiber vector geophone (invited)

Hong GAO1, Dakuan YU1, Xiaodong LUO1, Wei FAN1, Huidong LI1, and Xueguang QIAO2、*
Author Affiliations
  • 1Shaanxi Engineering Research Center of Oil and Gas Resource Optical Fiber Detection, College of Science, Xi’an Shiyou University, Xi’an 710065, China
  • 2Department of Physics, Northwest University, Xi’an 710065, China
  • show less

    Significance Oil and natural gas are important chemical raw materials and strategic resources in industrial society. With the increasing demand for oil and natural gas, it is urgent to increase the efforts of exploration and development. As a new type of geophone, optical fiber vector geophone has many advantages, such as high sensitivity, easy networking and multiplexing, high temperature resistance, vector measurement. It can obtain rich seismic wave signals, and have a wide range of application values in finding remaining oil, improving the success rate of exploration, monitoring reservoir performance in real time, helping to optimize production plans and improving oil and gas recovery. In the future, fiber vector geophone will not only play an important role in the field of resource exploration, but also have broad application prospects in engineering geology, environmental protection and scientific research.Progress Firstly, the model and working principle of inertial vibration sensor are analyzed. According to the relationship between the frequency of the measured vibration signal and the natural frequency of the sensor, the vibration sensor is divided into displacement meter, speedometer and accelerometer. The amplitude-frequency response curves of these three kinds of vibration sensors are given respectively, and their respective working frequency bands are analyzed. Based on the optical principle, optical fiber geophones are subdivided into distributed optical fiber geophones, laser optical fiber geophones, interferometric optical fiber geophones and fiber grating geophones. The working principles of the four types of geophones are introduced respectively, and the research progress of the above four types of optical fiber geophones is reviewed. Distributed optical fiber geophone (DAS) has been applied to some extent because it is easy to use and there is almost no potential safety hazard. The research of DAS vector detection has appeared, but the transmission loss will reduce the number of detectors and shorten the detection distance, which affects the high-density advantage of DAS using the optical fiber itself as the detector. Laser-type and interferometric fiber-optic geophones have obvious sensitivity advantages, but they are greatly affected by environmental temperature, so it is difficult to multiplex and demodulate in real time.Relatively speaking, FBG geophone has a variety of ways to realize vector detection, and has become the mainstream optical fiber solution for seismic wave vector detection.The measuring principle of fiber grating vector geophone is introduced highlighted and the research progress in recent years is reviewed. According to the mechanism of vibration measurement by fiber grating, the optical grating vector geophone is subdivided into simple orthogonal combination FBG vector geophone, cleverly designed common mass block FBG vector geophone, smaller two-dimensional special fiber FBG vector geophone, orthogonal polarization FBG vector geophone and cladding FBG vector geophone, and the field application of some FBG vector geophones is introduced. Multi-core special fiber FBG and cladding fiber FBG have excellent recognition ability of two-dimensional vector acceleration. In the future, with the reduction of the cost of related optical devices and the appearance of specially designed thin cladding fiber and large spacing multi-core fiber, the practical process of FBG vector detector will be further promoted. Of course, the sensitivity of FBG vector detector needs to be improved, and the mechanical structure of special fiber, orthogonal polarization and cladding FBG needs to be improved to improve its natural frequency. Multi-level multiplexing and demodulation methods of geophone need to be further studied. The cladding FBG demodulated by intensity also needs to eliminate the influence of power fluctuation.In addition, when it is used in oil and gas wells, it also needs the support of special pushing equipment and the photoelectric composite cable.Conclusions and Prospects There are many researches on fiber-optic geophones, but with the higher requirements for seismic wave detection, it is inevitable to develop fiber-optic vector geophones that can detect both transverse waves and longitudinal waves. This paper aims to provide some references for the design and optimization of fiber-optic vector geophones in the future through the introduction and analysis of the current situation of fiber-optic vector seismic wave detection, hoping to promote its practical application.

    Keywords
    Tools

    Get Citation

    Copy Citation Text

    Hong GAO, Dakuan YU, Xiaodong LUO, Wei FAN, Huidong LI, Xueguang QIAO. Recent advances of optical fiber vector geophone (invited)[J]. Infrared and Laser Engineering, 2025, 54(4): 20250095

    Download Citation

    EndNote(RIS)BibTexPlain Text
    Save article for my favorites
    Paper Information

    Category: Invited review

    Received: Jan. 31, 2025

    Accepted: --

    Published Online: May. 16, 2025

    The Author Email: Xueguang QIAO (xgqiao@nwu.edu.cn)

    DOI:10.3788/IRLA20250095

    Topics