The TimePipe is a special kind of time domain optical reflectometer. Similar to known Optical Time Domain Reflectometry ( OTDR ) it analyses the delay of back-scattered laser pulses to conclude to the location of a discontinuity inside an optical fibre. Different from OTDR not all back-scattered light is detected but alternating two narrow spectra are filtered out: Firstly the Stokes shifted wavelength and secondly the anti Stokes shifted laser wavelength.

It is known, that inside an optical fibre the ratio of the intensities of the Stokes shifted and the anti Stokes shifted portions of the backscattering represent the temperature. Together with the time-correlated and single photon sensitive recording of these signals a spatially resolved temperature measurement becomes possible.

This technique is known as Distributed Temperature Sensing (DTS). The TimePipe is a so called single ended processing device, which means, that the sensor fibre used is addressed from one end, only. This device can generally be used for DTS measurements, but has yet to be considered as a research device. In practice many characteristics of the fibre influence the result that theoretically represents the temperature. A careful calibration and a lot of experience is still needed to achieve reliable temperature data.

For that reason the TimePipe itself delivers at the moment only the raw data of the scattering. If you are interested in temperature monitoring we strongly recommend you to contact a service provider (e.g. Geso mbH Jena) that will give you advice in installation and calibration.