Detecting Bending and Impact Events in a Fiber Optic Cable Using Distributed Acoustic Sensing to Assess Potential Offshore Power Cable Damges

Abstract

A key vulnerability of offshore energy production facilities are submarine power cables. Monitoring a power cable during its entire lifetime is a strategy to minimize critical damages. Submarine power cables contain fiber optic cables that can be used for monitoring purposes. In this paper we show that a recent fiber optic sensing technique (CP-ΦOTDR) [11] is capable of detecting bending and impact events in a fiber optic cable. It does so with a limited reproducibility however, which for impact events cannot be solely explained by the variability of the impact force. There is a slight signature present for impact events: identical impact force events correlate more than events belonging to non-identical forces. This work is a first step in developing a monitoring tool to help assess the severity of power cable damages due to incident impacts and critical bending states.