Chemical sensing is of great importance in many application fields, such as medicine, environmental monitoring, and industrial process control. Distributed fibre-optic sensing received significant attention because of its unique feature to make spatially resolved measurements along the entire fibre. Distributed chemical sensing (DCS) is the combination of these two techniques and offers potential solutions to real-world applications that require spatially dense chemical measurements covering large length scales. This paper presents a review of the working principles, current status, and the emerging trends within DCS.
Keywords: chemical sensing; distributed fibre sensing; fibre optics; fibre sensing.