Photonic-electronic hybrid distributed acoustic sensing for broadband detection systems

To overcome the intrinsic noise limitations of the distributed acoustic optical fiber sensing (DAS) system, this study presents an economical photonic-electronic hybrid acoustic sensing system that integrates the DAS system with a flexible piezoelectric fiber sensor. The key concept is to cross-correlate synchronized optical and electrical signals so that common acoustic components are reinforced while uncorrelated sensor noise is efficiently suppressed. In this way, signal quality can be improved through a simple and lightweight processing strategy without costly hardware modification or computationally intensive algorithms. Experiments demonstrate wide-band acoustic detection from 170 Hz to 10 kHz, with average signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) enhancements of 6.7 dB for the photonic channel and 3.8 dB for the electronic channel. Furthermore, because both the piezoelectric sensor and the optical fiber are fiber-shaped devices, the piezoelectric fiber can be fabricated over long lengths and co-deployed with the sensing fiber in distributed monitoring environments. These features make the proposed approach a practical route toward high-quality, broadband, and deployment-compatible acoustic sensing for advanced distributed monitoring applications.