Earthquake gives FiberSense's fiber sensing tech a profile boost

An earthquake in New Zealand last week ended up serving as a showcase for the capabilities of fiber-based sensing technology.

The Cook Strait earthquake that occurred off-shore Northwest of Wellington, New Zealand on Sept. 22 registered as a 5.2-magnitude rumbler, according to local reports. FiberSense, an infrastructure sensing and monitoring company based in Australia, has sensing equipment inside fiber optic cable nearby.

“Our DigitalSeismic sensing service that we have operating on fiber optic telecoms cables in Wellington detected a range of activity from the earthquake centered on the Cook Strait last week,” said Mark Englund, Founder and CEO of FiberSense. “We cross-referenced our measurements with the records of the official earthquake sensors and the results were remarkable – for the first time ever we’ve calibrated the impact of quakes down to a building-by-building analysis level.” 

He added, “Immediately after the earthquake last week we first confirmed that the main data points from the official readings like magnitude and wave movement across ground closely matched with our readings. This established that our fiber optic based quake detection is as reliable as current methods that depend on monitoring stations scattered across New Zealand. The most compelling finding is that because the fiber-based method constantly records the activity as the event wave moves across the earth, our DigitalSeismic service captured the peak ground acceleration with around 1000x greater fidelity compared to what conventional seismic networks achieved.”

That enhanced fidelity is important because it can help everyone first responders to government officials assess damage and lingering dangers in the aftermath of an earthquake or other seismic event.

According to Englund, who spoke with Fierce Electronics via email, FiberSense’s solution, based on its proprietary VID+R technology, which is deployed in both terrestrial and undersea fiber cable, works by “reading the changes in light pulses flowing across the fiber optic cable. Vibrations around the cable, such as those caused by mechanical digging or anchors dragging across submarine cables, are detected as threats to the infrastructure around the cable. Earthquake shock waves are also detected. Through machine learning capability, different threats and events trigger different responses, ranging from no action if scheduled maintenance activities are detected through to rapid on-site interdiction for unauthorized interference.”

Englund further explained, “The service includes alarms that are triggered when cables are disturbed or compromised by activities such as unauthorized mechanical digging, tampering or cable breaks. This data is applicable to operations and assurance IT professionals in the oil, gas, water, fiber infrastructure and data center industries who need cost-effective, scalable and situationally aware monitoring for critical infrastructure. The technology can help prevent and detect damage caused by dig-ins and excavation strikes near power, water, oil, gas and internet lines in addition to the advanced warning of life-threatening catastrophic events such as earthquakes and tsunamis. For subsea cables, the service can provide visibility of ships that may damage subsea cables by bottom trawling and anchor drag.”

Such fiber monitoring is important in a world where cables are accidentally and intentionally compromised on a frequent basis, and because sensing occurs every few meters throughout a long fiber cable, it can be more efficient over a long distance than deploying other kinds of IoT-based sensors.  

 

“Fiber optic based sensing has significant advantages over other approaches to event detection such as Internet of Things (IoT) devices,” Englund said. “For instance, the FiberSense solution acts as a sensor that detects events at every few meters along the fiber optic cable. In effect it transforms the fiber into a gapless, real-time sensor across 100kms [hundreds of kilometers] of network. IoT, on the other hand, are individual units, requiring their own power source and open to the impacts of weather and natural hazards.  IoT devices are also limited in the range that they cover and they are deployed to do specific readings. The FiberSense detection can be adapted for multiple events or use cases simply through software adaptations.”

Englund said the company’s technology is already deployed in terrestrial and undersea telecom networks around the world, and eventually he sees it playing a larger role not only in cities and other areas prone to earthquakes, but also in smart cities and autonomous driving. “In the future, the data produced by the VID+R sensing service is what will help make smart cities and autonomous vehicles a reality due to its ability to sense objects and events, including pedestrians and cars, in real-time,” he said.