One more reason to go to OFC this year
  We’re going to be at OFC again this year and we hope that you are too! Visit us at booth #623As we’ve done in the past, we will be demonstrating our optical technologies at our booth, including our Component Analyzers, Reflectometers, and Tunable Lasers. Have you seen our Fiber Optic Testing instruments yet?Well, what you’ll see is that our technology allows engineers to…Read More
Getting More from Fatigue Testing
John J. KutzApplications EngineeringLightwave Division Fiber optic sensors have a great combination of simple installation, repeatability and fatigue endurance that make them well suited for use in fatigue testing. Characterizing fatigue behavior of parts or structures is important in applications where parts are subjected to cyclic loading. such as fan or turbine blades commonly used in aerospace, automotive, power generation and the HVAC industries. Getting…Read More
What can you see with High Spatial Resolution RL?
Aida Rahim, PhDField Applications EngineerLightwave Division Our previous blog post on return loss (RL) gave an overview of some examples of events along the optical network that cause high RL, and their effects. To recap, in technical terms, RL is the ratio of the light reflected back from a device under test, Pout, to the light launched into that device, Pin, usually expressed as a…Read More
What is Return Loss and Why Measure It?
Aida Rahim, PhDField Applications EngineerLightwave Division Optical fiber is the data carrier of choice compared to copper wire. Fiber optic networks have exponentially higher capacity, experience no crosstalk, and can be installed in areas with high electromagnetic interference such as along utility and power lines. Fiber optic networks span multiple length scales. Intercity and transoceanic fiber optic telecommunications networks span thousands of kilometers. In aircrafts…Read More
How Luna’s Fiber Optic Technology Can Help the Racing Industry
Matt Wolfe Chief of StaffLightwave Division Motorsports teams face a variety of challenges every day. A race car is not just one engineering problem, but a collection of inter-relating engineering problems. Some of these problems are well understood while others are somewhat a mystery. In order to learn and understand these unknown problems, race engineers need new tools and instrumentation that will allow them to…Read More
Installing Fiber Strain Sensors – Part II
Eric E. Sanborn, P.E.Director, Engineering and ProductionLightwave Division In the first part of our story on installing fiber strain sensors we covered the basics of applying Luna’s ODiSI sensing fiber to simple parts for measuring strain. In this second part we will discuss the planning and execution of instrumenting large or complex structures. The planning stage tends to be a sizable chunk of the total…Read More
Installing Fiber Strain Sensors
Eric E. Sanborn, P.E.Director, Engineering and ProductionLightwave Division In this first part of a two part post we will describe how a fiber optic strain sensor compares physically to a conventional foil gage sensor and how it can be bonded to a simple coupon. In the second part we will explore instrumenting complex parts and structures. Luna’s ODiSI sensing solution can replace hundreds or even…Read More
4 new ways the ODiSI has gotten even better!
Dawn K. Gifford, Ph.D.Director of Product R&D, Lightwave Division In the first half of 2012 we introduced our ODiSI B distributed fiber sensing system. With this system, simple, off-the-shelf, unaltered optical fiber can be used to measure strain or temperature at every point along the fiber. The system as introduced provides data over 10 m of fiber length with 5 mm spatial resolution and a…Read More
Sensing in Pressure Vessels: Fiber Optics Open Doors for an Industry
Matt ReavesOptical ScientistLightwave Division We’ve already shown you some of the benefits of fiber optic sensors in our previous blog post “So, what is so compelling about distributed fiber optic sensing?!â€. In that article, we showed that fiber optic sensors show excellent agreement with traditional foil strain gages while also exhibiting superior fatigue performance, as demonstrated in a fatigue test of a 9-meter wind turbine…Read More
So, what is so compelling about distributed fiber optic sensing?!
Sandra M. Klute, Ph.D.Director of Research, Contract ServicesLightwave Division We recently presented our distributed fiber optic sensing technology at the October 2012 meeting of SAMPE TECH (The Society for the Advancement of Material and Process Engineering). The topic of the presentation, “Fiber Optic Distributed Strain Sensing used to Investigate The Strain Fields in a Wind Turbine Blade and in a Test Coupon with Open Holes, Read More
