The customer had explored the application of distributed acoustic fiber sensing for the rail industry using several manufacturers products. The issues the client had were that the existing DAS products were too expensive, complex and significantly did not have the right level of technical performance needed for rail industry applications. Specifically, the customer needed a DAS solution that had a quantitative performance over very long ranges and most importantly that they could interface directly into the various data levels to integrate into other rail sensing and control systems. Commercially the client wanted to ensure they had long term access to future developments in DAS technology to enable them to build a fiber sensing business for the global rail industry.

The Sintela Solution

Sintela worked with the client to create a bespoke rail distributed fiber sensing solution (R-DfS) covering multiple measurements. The R-DfS system created was an open architecture system enabling the client to interface directly with all levels of data collected. Sintela formed partnership with the client to provide them with long term access to the underlying IP and access to a joint development team dedicated to fiber sensing in the rail industry.

The Value Delivered

The R-DfS system delivered over a 10x improvement in sensitivity and increased the number of measurements per sensor by 5x as well as reducing the cost of deployment by over 50% compared to their previous DAS systems.