Public Funding for Focus Sensors Limited

Focus Sensors will build upon collaborative work undertaken with the rail industry in exploring where FOAS (fibre optic acoustic sensing) and our unique FOMS (fibre optic movement sensing) can enhance operational and management capabilities. Our technology leverages significant opportunity value from the presence of fibre optic cables running alongside railways. Much progress has been made in developing our technology to support the operation and management of railway systems, and greater potential is evident. GCRE brings a near-unique opportunity to also conduct a pioneering exploration for the value of fibre optic sensing to support railway construction. Our in-house team has full ownership and control of the design, manufacture and configuration of our Indus hardware and software platform which is the heart of our FOAS and FOMS capabilities. Our team will engage with those having responsibilities across the whole of the GCRE design, build, operate and maintain phases to propose a development, test and deployment journey which can maximise the value of the GCRE offering. GCRE represents a development and demonstration environment where we aspire to be a long-term partner as a route to supporting our international activities in the rail marketplace. The Great British Railways Transition Team commented that rail is too siloed, too slow and too prescriptive. We believe GCRE can demonstrate and promote shared approaches, flexibility and faster delivery. Our fibre optic sensing is a prime agile technology which can become a beacon for affordable rail modernisation, where broader challenges are likely to arise from reduced rail usage, delayed replacement of ageing infrastructure, specialist skills leaving the railway, greater reliance on higher grades of train automation and the prevalence of extreme climate events. GCRE will be a UK showcase and this funding call is a great opportunity for UK companies like Focus Sensors to collaborate and deliver innovative UK technology products fit for GCRE's highly representative rail infrastructure. Fibre optic sensing will present outputs in a live and visual format which can be consumed by visitors to GCRE or via the Internet for those who are not able to visit.

When cable thefts occur the operation of the railway, often in nationally critical locations, can be brought to a standstill with significant impact on passengers and freight supply-chains. Under extreme industry and public pressure, Network Rail must delay scheduled activities and scramble teams to effect repairs and get critical railway operational systems working again. Current technology may not be able to locate the break to better than a few km accuracy, meaning long periods of manual inspection are required to locate the exact position of the theft before the repair can be started. This wastes valuable time, increasing the effect of the theft on the efficiency of the network and creating cost for operators and delays for customers. This proposal is for a technology solution, using existing trackside optical fibre cables, which can be used to locate cable thefts instantly to within +/- 1m. After a theft is reported or detected by other system, automatic analysis will pinpoint the location of the acoustic signatures of the theft activity. The location of the theft will be instantly displayed, both on a map overlay with geographical coordinates, and as a linear ELR, miles and yards track location. This will enable first-responder policing and security to be deployed sooner and more accurately. Secondly, with an accurately timed and positioned event signature, there is an opportunity for other parties with evidence collecting abilities (e.g. Forward Facing CCTV on trains) to more proactively, and possibly automatically, to retain evidence which may support prosecution. Thirdly the Network Rail engineering team will be given advanced information to allow them to attend the site with the right materials and resource to affect an earlier resolution. As secondary activity we will enable location of optical cable by creating a companion georeferencing co-reference for the trackside fibre cable, so that faults and fibre issues can be located instantly to a more precise physical location. This provides a valuable tool for Network Rail's engineering teams, to reduce time for maintenance and fault finding.

Optical fibres are all around us, enabling long distance communications powering the internet, CCTV beside highways and signals on our railways. Distributed Acoustic Sensors (DAS) can connect to these fibres and, by measuring distributed dynamic strain, use them to infer the pattern of life near the fibre. DAS has possible use cases spanning multiple markets including; transport, where fibres near road or rail are used to measure traffic; energy, where fibres in boreholes are used to maximise production rates and security where vibrations from footsteps indicate trespass. Focus Sensors produce a new form of DAS called Indus. Having commercialised Indus, Focus Sensors wish to demonstrate its value across a broad range of applications by performing a number of field trials. Before COVID-19, an extensive worldwide program of field trials was planned. However, inability to travel and work with customers and end users on their site has made it impossible for trials to go ahead as planned. In the new reality, a new approach is required. Trial Indus will be developed in this program. Trial Indus will be deployable remotely without need for Focus Sensors' employees to enter customer's site. For the first time, using internet networks and cloud computing, Trial Indus will allow remote real-time processing of data collected from customer infrastructure. Results will be viewed on simple, configurable dashboards, that can be made available to customers as well as to FS engineers. Trial Indus will allow streamlined remote deployment and collaboration between FS and our customers at a deep technical level, without any risk of COVID-19 transmission. This will directly accelerate uptake of Indus, leading to numerous benefits for FS and for the UK.