Distributed temperature sensing (DTS) instrument, rented by the month
A temperature reading every half metre of fibre, from a field box that runs on a battery.
Distributed temperature sensing turns an ordinary optical fibre into thousands of thermometers along its length. Scatterways reads single-mode and multimode fibre from the same instrument, calibrates on your own cable, and writes files the open-source toolchain already loads.
A pulse of light, two colours back
- A short pulse of light goes into the fibre.
- Every point along the glass sends back a faint glow, in two colours.
- The balance of the two colours is the temperature at that point.
- The time the glow takes to come back says where it came from.
In numbers
| Fibre | Single-mode G.652 and G.657, multimode 50/125 and 62.5/125, any common APC connector, in the same unit. |
| Resolution and noise | 0.5 metre class, sampled every 0.41 m; 0.11 K at 2 km with five-minute averaging; three software modes trade resolution against noise. |
| Range | 0.5 to 5 km on single-mode, about 10 km on multimode. |
| Layouts | Single-ended, double-ended loop and mirror-ended; up to eight fibres through the optical switch. |
| Calibration | Automatic on your cable: two reference coils inside the box and a read from both ends of a loop. |
| Power | 9 to 36 V DC or PoE; about 2.3 W averaged at one profile an hour, so weeks on a battery. |
| Data | Dashboard, REST and MQTT, and files in netCDF, CSV and HDF5. |
| Upgrade | The acoustic tile slides into the same box on site, so a temperature rental becomes a combined one without a second instrument. |
Full numbers, with their conditions, on the technical page.
Asked before
- What is the difference between resolution and sampling?
- Sampling is the spacing of readings along the fibre, 0.41 m. Resolution is the length over which a step change is fully seen, half a metre in the standard mode. Both are quoted on the technical page.
- Which fibre should I buy if I have none?
- For temperature, multimode 50/125 gives the strongest signal up to a few kilometres. If you may want acoustics later, choose single-mode or a cable with both. Either comes with the rental.
- How is it calibrated?
- Two temperature-controlled reference coils inside the instrument give the absolute scale, and reading a looped cable from both ends removes the cable's own loss. The method agrees with the open-source reference to 0.014 K on the same data.
Applications
- Geothermal
What is the ground made of, layer by layer, and is the field slowly cooling?
You get Thermal conductivity and borehole resistance per depth interval, with uncertainty, from one test.
Read more - Streams and lakes
Where does groundwater enter the stream, and how much?
You get Inflow zones marked along the reach, ranked by strength, from the damping and phase lag of the daily cycle.
Read more - Glaciers and permafrost
What is the borehole doing through the winter, when nobody can get there?
You get An hourly or four-hourly profile of the whole borehole, every day of the season.
Read more - Pipelines and district heating
Where is the leak, before the road sinks? Hot water, cold water or gas.
You get A per-metre temperature baseline for the route, with every persistent deviation located to the half metre.
Read more
Put your fibre to work.
Tell us about your fibre and your question. You get a call, a plan for your site and a monthly price.