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Abstract There is growing interest in floating offshore wind turbine (FOWT) technology, where turbines are installed on floating structures anchored to the seabed, allowing wind energy development in areas unsuitable for traditional fixed-platform turbines. Responsible development requires monitoring the impact of FOWTs on marine wildlife, such as whales, throughout the operational lifecycle of the turbines. Distributed acoustic sensing (DAS)—a technology that transforms fiber-optic cables into vibration sensor arrays—has been demonstrated for acoustic monitoring of whales using seafloor telecommunications cables. However, no studies have yet evaluated DAS performance in dynamic, engineered environments, such as floating platforms or moving vessels with complex, dynamic strain loads, despite their relevance to FOWT settings. This study addresses that gap by deploying DAS aboard a boat in Monterey Bay, California, where a fiber-optic cable was lowered using a weighted and suspended mooring line, enabling vertical deployment. Humpback whale vocalizations were captured and identified in the DAS data, noise sources were identified, and DAS data were compared to audio captured by a standalone hydrophone attached to the mooring line and a nearby hydrophone on a cabled observatory. This study is unique in: (1) deploying DAS in a vertical deployment mode, where noise from turbulence, cable vibrations, and other sources posed additional challenges compared to seafloor DAS applications; (2) demonstrating DAS in a dynamic, nonstationary setup, which is uncommon for DAS interrogators typically used in more stable environments; and (3) leveraging looped sections of the cable to reduce the noise floor and mitigate the effects of excessive cable vibrations and strain. This research demonstrates DAS’s ability to capture whale vocalizations in challenging environments, highlighting its potential to enhance underwater acoustic monitoring, particularly in the context of renewable energy development in offshore environments. 

Material cracking is one of the key mechanisms contributing to structural failure. Distributed fiber optic sensing (DFOS) can measure the strain profile along optical fiber distributively. However, the conventional strain measurement using a Brillouin-DFOS system (Brillouin optical time-domain analysis/reflectometry (BOTDA/R)) has a decimeter-order spatial resolution, making it difficult to measure the highly localized strain generated by a sub-millimeter crack. This paper introduces a crack analysis method based on decomposing the Brillouin scattering spectrum to overcome the spatial resolution induced crack measurement limitation of the BOTDA/R system. The method uses the non-negative least squares algorithm to back-calculate the strain profile within the spatial resolution around each measurement point. The performance of this method is verified by a four point bending test of a brittle slag cement-cement-bentonite beam. The crack width estimation error is improved to ±0.005 mm for a crack as narrow as 0.76 mm. 

Brillouin scattering-based distributed fiber optic sensing (Brillouin-DFOS) technology is widely used in health monitoring of large-scale structures with the aim to provide early warning of structural degradation and timely maintenance and renewal. Material cracking is one of the key mechanisms that contribute to structural failure. However, the conventional strain measurement using the Brillouin-DFOS system has a decimeter-order spatial resolution, and therefore it is difficult to measure the highly localized strain generated by a sub-millimeter crack. In this study, a new crack analysis method based on Brillouin scattering spectrum (BSS) data is proposed to overcome this spatial resolution-induced measurement limitation. By taking the derivative of the BSS data and tracking their local minimums, the method can extract the maximum strain within the spatial resolution around the measurement points. By comparing the variation of the maximum strain within the spatial resolution around different measurement points along the fiber, cracks can be located. The performance of the method is demonstrated and verified by locating and quantifying a small gap created between two wood boards when one of the wood boards is pushed away from the other. The test result verifies the accuracy of the crack strain quantification of the method and proves its capability to measure a sub-millimeter crack. The method is also applied to a thin bonded concrete overlay of asphalt pavement field experiment, in which the growth of a transverse joint penetrating through the concrete–asphalt interface was monitored. The method successfully locates the position, traces the strain variation, and estimates the width of a crack less than [Formula: see text] wide using a Brillouin-DFOS system with [Formula: see text] spatial resolution.