Monitoring of Underground Hydrogen Storage Facility based on Multi-parameter Distributed Fiber Optic Sensing

• Applicant: Xin Lu, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Measurement Systems
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 541646931

As one of the most important energy resources in the future, Hydrogen is able to decelerate climate warming and realize a low-carbon environment. Since hydrogen is a highly flammable and explosive gas, it must be handled with special care during the phases of production, transportation, storage and application. For this reason and due to their large volume, underground hydrogen storage facilities should be continuously and seamlessly monitored around the clock. Current monitoring techniques cannot meet such strict requirement satisfactorily, whereas the distributed fiber sensing can deliver an excellent solution. The DFS are based on Rayleigh, Brillouin or Raman scattering effects and employ an inexpensive standard fiber as the sensing medium, which can withstand the harsh environment underground. More importantly, it can realize seamless measurement over km-range, which is necessary to monitor any facilities. However, current fiber sensing systems are able to detect only one or two sensing parameters at the same time and fail to realize comprehensive monitoring of the hydrogen storage or simultaneous measurement of several measured variables (as required in practice). In this project, a hybrid distributed fiber sensing system will be developed based on three scattering effects (Rayleigh, Brillouin and Raman), so that hydrogen concentration, temperature, strain, relative humidity and vibration can be simultaneously along one fiber measured. Development of both innovative hardware and advanced signal processing methods will be realized, so that a high-performance multiparameter fiber sensor system is created for the first time internationally as a result of the project.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants