Category: Fiber Bragg Gratings

Fiber Optic Equipment Goes Biocompatible and Implantable thanks to Hydrogel Fibers

FBGs used in hydrogel fibers A biocompatible and highly stretchable optical fiber made from hydrogel may be implanted in the body to deliver therapeutic pulses of light or light up at the first sign of disease. This hydrogel fiber was developed by researchers from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Harvard Medical School. Hydrogels have already shown significant potential in everything from wound dressings to soft robots, but until now their fiber optic applications have been limited from their lack of toughness. Hydrogels are made of hydrophilic polymer chains that absorb up to 90 percent water. Such fiber optic products aren’t very strong or durable, but by adding glass tiny fibers the researchers created a tough, bendable, stretchable material.

In other words, a hydrogel is an extremely absorbent type of gel, a network of simple polymers that can contain up to 99,9% water, by weight. As the walls of this hydrogel, the material lining the interior of an optical fiber is clear but tuned to produce a phenomenon called total internal reflection. This means that light that moves at certain angles from the cable’s core material to its lining will be entirely reflected. By tuning hydrogel to create the same effect, scientists and engineers from MIT created a form of biocompatible optical cable. Getting light into the body is important: in the most basic sense, pulses of light are information, and having a hard-wired line of communication to implanted technology will be essential for development. However, it should be noted, such a wireless technique is still too unreliable for most people to bet their lives on, and it’s also notoriously hard on power consumption.

The researchers say that fiber optic products may serve as a long-lasting implant that would bend and twist with the body without breaking down. The researchers also have devised multiple recipes for making tough but pliable hydrogels out of various biopolymers. Plus the team has come up with ways to bend hydrogels with various surfaces such as metallic sensors and LEDs. Each optical fiber transmitted light without significant attention or fading. These fiber optic devices also found that fibers could be stretched over seven times their original length without breaking. Such modern fiber optic products can be used for long-term diagnostics, to optically monitor tumors or inflammation.

In other words, hydrogel fibers are interesting and provide a compelling direction for embedding light within the human body. Only considerable efforts in optimizing and managing the physical and mechanical properties of fibers will enable practical applications of medical relevance.

Optromix is a fast-growing vendor of fiber Bragg grating (FBG) products line: fiber Bragg grating sensors, FBG interrogators, and multiplexers, Distributed Temperature Sensing (DTS) systems. We create and supply a broad variety of top-notch fiber optic solutions for the monitoring of various facilities all over the world.

If you are interested in Optromix fiber optic products, please contact us at info@optromix.com

Fiber Optic Products Key to Optimised Fully Implantable Hearing Aids

FBGs for hearing aids Modern research allows creating more and more biocompatible and highly stretchable fiber optic products. The optical fiber may one day be implanted in the body to deliver therapeutic pulses of light up at the first sign of disease. The world’s healthcare providers are increasingly looking to advanced biomedical instrumentation to enable more efficient patient diagnosis, monitoring, and treatment. Fiber optic equipment can be used in humans (clinical), in animals (veterinary), or other living organisms (life sciences), and, depending on the intended use, can be for diagnostic, therapeutic, or intensive care uses in clinical applications, research, and preclinical development, or laboratory testing.

The joint Austrian-Serbian team is moving closer to developing a fully implantable hearing aid. The technology is based on completely contact-free fiber optic equipment that senses the tiniest ossicle movements and use them to stimulate the acoustic nerves. The weak spot of the fully surgically implantable hearing devices is the microphones, which receive sounds and use a sophisticated process to transform them into impulses for the acoustic nerves. It is important that such microphones can function error-free inside the human body for many years. Nowadays this is only possible to a limited extent, so now solutions are urgently needed.

New fully implantable hearing aids can overcome a wide range of patient’s problems. Even state-of-the-art hearing aids often require parts outside the ear. This has many disadvantages for people who wearing hearing aids. For example, parts of the ear often become inflamed and the wearer’s own voice sounds distorted. Plus traditional hearing aids can be stigmatized if the device is visible.

The use of contact-free fiber optics measuring devices to detect sounds is the one highly important advance. Such fiber optic products would allow the microphone to be positioned inside the ear. This technology is based on low-coherence interferometry, a method which picks up superimposed sound waves. The ability to pick up sound from the ossicles is a huge advantage because it fully preserves the natural amplification function distortion and feedback.

The team of Austrian-Serbian scientists needed to address a number of fundamental requirements. For instance, they had to develop the operative procedure for the implantation, as well as the means of “targeting” the laser used for sensing. In the process of research scientists used artificial and animal models, which allowed them to optimize the quality of the ossicle vibration sensing system. The recently published findings confirm the effectiveness of the technology and that, in principle, could be used inside the ear for long periods. Aspects such as system miniaturization and electricity consumption will also be addressed by the team.

Optromix is a fast-growing seller of such products from the fiber Bragg grating (FBG) line of products: fiber Bragg grating sensors, FBG interrogators, and multiplexers and, of course, Distributed Temperature, Acoustic, and Strain Sensing systems (DTS). Our major goal is to deliver the best quality of fiber optic sensors to our clients. Optromix creates and supplies a broad variety of excellent fiber-optic solutions for the monitoring of various facilities all over the world.

If you are interested in Optromix fiber optic products, please contact us at info@optromix.com

FBGs fiber optic products fiber optic solutions

Advanced Fiber Optic Solutions Further Biomedicine

FBGs for biomedicine Nowadays the production of optical fibers is robust and flexible enough to address an exciting new range of biomedical applications. Fiber optic applications in general and they are in biomedicine have gained momentum in recent years. The optical fiber has been used primarily for endoscopy and laser power delivery, but now a wide base of academic and corporate-funded studies is exploring both in vivo and in vitro areas, with a number of new applications entering full-scale manufacturing. This growth has been fueled by a list of capabilities, including entering fuel-scale manufacturing. This growth has been fueled by a list of capabilities, including:

electromagnetic interference (EMI)-free transmission of energy and signals
small diameter
biocompatible coating
high mechanical flexibility
image transmission
the ability to sense pressure, temperature, chemicals, and strain.

The great capabilities suggest the introduction of fiber optic products in a wide range of applications. Such a broad range of applications requires a wide selection of fiber optic products with designs ranging from large-core, large-diameter multimode (MM) optical fibers for high-power laser light delivery to small-core, reduced-diameter single-mode (SM) optical fiber for in vivo sensing. Additional requirements demand advanced coatings because special coatings enable reduced thickness and greater tolerances: polyimide, for instance, in contradistinction to an acrylate, can withstand temperatures up to 300ºC as well as autoclave sterilization.

Device miniaturization is required for in vivo applications: fiber optic products and based on the fiber optic systems typically need to localize within a catheter tube where typical sizes for surgical procedures, such as coronary angioplasty, range from 5F to 8F (1473-2286 μn diameter). A standard optical fiber with a 245 μm coating diameter can fit within this catheter space, but it will need to accommodate other devices as well, including guide wires and manipulation tools. Beyond dimensions, an optical fibers stiffness must be considered as it can impact the flexibility of the overall catheter assembly, affecting the ability to guide the catheter correctly.

It is important to note that fiber optic products do not contain any electrically conductive or magnetic materials. Any fiber optic equipment can be considered free from electromagnetic interference (EMI). In other words, fiber optic products can be used in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) devices and in close proximity to radiofrequency (RF) electrosurgery tools used for cutting, coagulating, desiccating, and fulgurating tissue. Alternative techniques require an electrical sensor element, making them not only unsuitable for MRI and RF use but also require a separate signal line for each sensor element, which adds to the cross-sectional area. Fiber optic solutions, in contrast, imply thousands of uniquely identifiable sensor elements and still require only the single line of fiber, without additional sacrifice to the diameter. This characteristic enables the transmission of multiple messages along one channel of communication. Such transmission often uses specially modified regions of the core called fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs).

In addition to this, one of the most impressive up-and-coming biomedical applications of fiber optic products is that of 3D shape sensing to facilitate procedures such as coronary angioplasty with minimal use of x-ray-assisted guidance. 3D shape sensing and distributed in vivo pressure sensing were not feasible, but optical fibers have made them possible.

Additionally, fiber optic devices have traditionally been developed and sold primarily for high-power laser applications. But their new generation and exactly a new generation of fiber optic probes allow both outputs of light in a particular format and collection of reflected light back into the optical fiber.

Optromix, Inc. is a U.S. manufacturer of innovative fiber optic products for the global market, based in Cambridge, MA. Our team always strives to provide the most technologically advanced fiber optic solutions for our clients. Our main goal is to deliver the best quality fiber optic products to our clients. We produce a wide range of fiber optic devices, including our cutting-edge customized fiber optic Bragg grating product line and fiber Bragg grating sensor systems. Optromix, Inc. is a top choice among the manufacturers of fiber Bragg grating monitoring systems. If you have any questions, please contact us at info@optromix.com

FBGs fiber optic products fiber optic solutions

How to Make Surgery Less Invasive with the Fiber Optic Products Help?

FBGs for less invasive surgery Optical fibers have the potential to be used in many biomedical applications. Such fibers have been used in medical devices since the 1960s when fiber optic bundles were successfully pioneered for both illumination and imaging through endoscopes. Optical fiber imaging tools were widely accepted for invasive surgery since the 1980s. The minimally invasive surgery promises decreased pain and trauma during operations, faster recovery, and a reduced risk of infection. Nowadays special fiber optic products also are used as intelligent sensors to monitor physiology parameters such as temperature, pressure, oxygen concentration, and applied force.

Fiber optic sensors offer many advantages in comparison with conventional electronic sensors in medical sensing: small size, immunity to electromagnetic interference (EMI), enhanced sensitivity, robustness, and geometrical versatility. Additionally, they are free from electrical parts or conductors in the sensor area. The unique properties of fiber optic products and based on the fiber optic equipment have enabled complicated procedures in cardiovascular examiners, angiology, gastroenterology, ophthalmology, oncology. neurology. dermatology, and dentistry. Novel specialty fiber types are also opening up entirely new sensing concepts. In addition to this, endoscopes represent the largest end-use market for medical fiber optics, supported by the growing popularity of minimally invasive surgeries. Minimization of medical instruments is a key trend encouraging the use of small and efficient optical fibers.

The integration of fiber optic applications in medical devices is a difficult task because it involves solving such problems as design and selection of fiber, packaging material, cost-effective manufacturing, quality control, and traceable record keeping.

In the last two decades, a variety of fiber optic products have been developed. However, it should be noted, point sensors based on Fabry-Perot interferometers and fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs) are probably the most deployed sensors in medical applications.

Fiber optic products and based on the fiber optic sensors are safe, valuable, highly stable, biocompatible tools for health-monitoring systems and they are amenable to sterilization and autoclaving. By modifying properties such as numerical aperture, core and cladding diameters, and coating material, the fibers can be adapted to different applications.

Why do fiber optic products find so many biomedical uses? Firstly, optical fibers, which used in medical sensors, have a thin polyimide coating to provide a small section and suitability for different kinds of sterilization processes. The temperature resistance of polyimide is difficult to match with other polymer materials. Secondly, the highly desirable parameter of the optical fiber for invasive surgery is tolerance to tight bonds. This allows for movement of the catheter, which winds through veins and arteries, and around organs and bones, on its way to an application area.

Summing up all of the above, the biomedical sensing market represents a lucrative and growing opportunity for fiber optic sensors, particularly for large volumes of disposable probes. The demand for move patient monitoring devices combines with a trend toward minimally invasive surgery, which itself requires a variety of small size that can be incorporated into catheters and endoscopes. There is also an opportunity for fiber optic sensors as EMI-compatible sensors to monitor vital signs during the use of MRI (and related techniques), as well as RF treatments.

If you are interested in Optromix FBG sensors or other fiber optic products, please contact us at info@optromix.com

FBGs fiber optic application fiber optic products

Fiber optics for Telecommunications

FBGs in telecommunications The uses of optical fiber today are quite numerous. With the explosion of information traffic due to the Internet, electronic commerce, computer networks, multimedia, voice, data, and video, the need for a transmission medium with the bandwidth capabilities for handling such vast amounts of information is paramount. Fiber optic devices, with its comparatively infinite bandwidth, has proven to be the solution.

Fiber optic products are a major building block in the telecommunication infrastructure. High bandwidth capabilities and low attenuation characteristics of fiber optic devices make it ideal for gigabit transmission and beyond. The growth of the fiber optics industry over the past five years has been explosive. Analysts expect that this industry will continue to grow at a tremendous rate well, into the next decade and beyond.

The telecommunications industry is made up of many types of companies at different levels within the industry. These companies make products and/or provide modern technology (VoIP, CATV, HDTV, security, and suchlike) to the end-user (residential, business, and institutional).

Fiber optic systems have many advantages over metallic-based communication systems:

long-distance signal transmission
large bandwidth, low weight, and small diameter
nonconductivity (since optical fiber has no metallic components, it can be installed in areas with electromagnetic interference (EMI), including radio frequency interference (RFI)
security
designed for future applications needs

As the industry of fiber optic products continues to grow, frustrating bottlenecks in the “information superhighway” will lessen, which will in turn usher in the next generation of services, such as telemedicine, Internet telephony, distance education, e-commerce, and high-speed data and video.

FBGs fiber optic products fiber optic solutions

Advantages of the Application Fiber Optic Products on Aircrafts

Fiber optic products are revolutionizing the avionics systems and ideally to be the perfect solution to future requirements. A modern jet has enormous amounts of data flowing through it to support the latest technologies in the cockpit and the cabin. All that data has to be delivered at lightning speed. This necessity has led aircraft manufacturers and airlines to turn to the optical fiber. The copper cables co-existed with fiber optic applications for decades. Currently, designers and engineers find fiber optic products to make better sense technically and economically in the overwhelming majority of cases.

The ability of the optical fiber to transmit much more information in less time over longer distances than traditional copper wire has become the reason that fiber optic equipment is being deployed on aircraft. There are fiber optic bundles of copper cables in an aircraft and the signals which they carry are fully replaceable by fiber optic products to allow an improvement of the system in various different ways.

There are two common trends regarding data transmission in the avionics market: constantly growing transmission speeds and the need to reduce weight. Fiber optic systems are an ideal response to these two trends in providing for high-speed data and immunity to electromagnetic interference that eliminates the need for any type of screening which can often be very expensive due to their weight and complexity. Fiber optic equipment offers lower wastage, weight, size, etc. These advantages make fiber optic equipment suitable for application in aircraft where space restrictions and electromagnetic interferences could be detrimental.

Nowadays fiber optic systems have been implemented in different aircraft systems such as sensory systems, distributed opening systems, and fiber optic aircraft monitoring. In addition to this, other areas such as defense and space are upgrading their communication systems in production vehicles by incorporating fiber optic equipment. Fiber optic systems are likely to enjoy a bright future in aircraft requirements.

FBGs fiber optic products fiber optic solutions

Fabrication and Applications of Fiber Optic Products

Fiber optic devices have revolutionized the world of network communication ever since their inception nearly four decades ago. Nowadays these devices have almost obliterated traditional methods of networking, which use metallic wires. The evolution of optical fibers in the field of not only telecommunications but also monitoring and sensing is conducted, particularly in remote or harsh environments. In this connection, the discovery of photosensitivity in optical fibers led to the establishment of fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs), optical filters, that have been widely employed in telecom and as measurement elements.

The history of optical fiber began with the invention of the “optical telegraph” by the French Chappe brothers (1780). This “optical telegraphs” was the system comprised of a series of light mounted on towers where operations transmitted messages from one tower to another. Almost a hundred years later, in 1870, John Tyndall demonstrated that light follows the curve of a stream of water pouring from a container. It was this simple principle that led to the study and development of applications for this phenomenon. Nowadays fiber optic devices are fiber optic cable systems consisting of a multitude of glass tubes that find a host of uses in a variety of fields. Precisely speaking, fiber optic cables are cables that contain several thousands of optical fibers in a protective, insulated jacket. The optical fibers are very thin strands of pure glass, which transmit information in the form of light. Fiber optic applications have become increasingly more integrated into networks where they facilitate telecommunication applications. These fiber optic cables are often used in medicine during surgeries as light guides and imaging tools. Fiber optic products are also used in industrial settings for imaging locations that are difficult to reach through conventional means.

Fiber optic products become more and more popular in a variety of industries and applications. There are two types of optical fibers:

Single-mode fiber. The core of the glass fiber is much finer than in multi-mode fibers: light travels parallel to the axis, creating little pulse dispersion. Data transmission modes are higher, and the distances that single-mode fiber can cover can be over 50 times longer than multi-mode fibers. Telephone and cable television networks install millions of kilometers of this fiber every year.
Multi-mode fiber. Multi-mode fibers allow different data streams to be sent simultaneously over a particular fiber.

Fiber optic devices have a multitude of advantages and benefits over the more traditional methods of information systems such as copper or coaxial cables:

Speed

One of the greatest benefits of using fiber optic systems is the capacity and speed. Light travels faster than an electrical system which allows faster delivery and reception of information;

Immunity to electromagnetic interference

Fiber optics are not affected by external electrical signals because the data is transmitted with light;

Security

Optical systems are more secure than traditional mediums. These circumstances make fiber optic systems extremely attractive to governments, banks, and companies requiring increased security of data;

Fire prevention

Fiber optic systems use light instead of electricity to carry signals, the probability of an electrical fire is eliminated;

Data signaling
Less expensive

Such services as the Internet are often cheaper because fiber optic signals stay strong longer, requiring less power over time to transmit signals than copper-wire systems, which need high-voltage transmitters;

Large bandwidth, small weight, and small diameter
Easy installation and upgrades
Long-distance and transmission

If you are interested in Optromix FBG sensors, please contact us at info@optromix.com

FBGs fiber optic products fiber optic solutions

Fiber Optic Products for Aircraft Structural Health Monitoring

FBGs for aircraft health monitoring Aircraft structures require regular, scheduled inspections and monitoring of all possible hazards due to their special conditions and the principles of their design. Therefore, structural health monitoring is conducted through fiber optic devices and has great potential to reduce the costs related to these operations. Fiber optic devices applied to the monitoring of aircraft structures provide some advantages over traditional devices. Fiber Bragg grating sensors have proved to constitute the most promising technology in this field. In order to prolong the operation period of all kinds of complex engineering systems and avoid catastrophic failures, so it is necessary to achieve the highest levels of damage detection. The automation of the inspection process is a point of major importance to reduce inspection efforts. The structural health monitoring system on the basis of fiber optic products can be defined as a set of devices that provide information that allows us to locate, evaluate, and predict the loading and damage conditions of a structure. The structural health monitoring of aircraft structures can conduct real-time checks, reducing costs, and improving the reliability and performance of the structures. A wide range of potential structural health monitoring technologies is being developed to meet these needs, and the most promising options are:

electrical strain gauges and crack wires
acoustic emissions methods
optical-based technologies
comparative vacuum monitoring
microelectromechanical systems (MEMS)

Fiber optic products and fiber optic devices, in general, are very appropriate to perform structural health monitoring due to the fact that they have their intrinsic capabilities, such as sensitivity to electromagnetic radiation, low weight, compact size, great sensitivity and resolution, and their suitability to be embedded into structures. Fiber optic devices for monitoring the strain in aircraft structures can be classified into the following categories: intensity-based, interferometric, distributed, and grating-based fiber optic devices.

Among grating-based sensors, FBGs and probably the most mature and widely employed optical sensors for structural health monitoring of engineering structures due to their fast development achieved in recent years. Fiber Bragg grating sensors have important advantages over conventional strain sensors:

high sensitivity and resolution, low weight and small size, the absence of the electromagnetic interference
suitability for being attached to a structure or embedded in composite materials
high multiplexing capability
wavelength-encoded sensing in a way that is totally independent of the optical intensity
different magnitudes can be measured using FBGs, such as strain, temperature, vibration, or humidity.

If you are interested in Optromix FBG sensors, please contact us at info@optromix.com

FBGs fiber optic products structural health monitoring

Performance of fiber Bragg gratings in radiation environments

The developments in photonics led to a communication revolution over the past two decades. The technologies developed for telecommunications are now being used in the development of sensors for a wide variety of applications. The sensors based on photonic technology are especially valuable for applications where the measurements need to be taken in harsh environments like ones encountered in space exploration and nuclear power plants. Fiber Bragg grating sensors are preferred as they are compact in size, have low power consumption, and are tolerant to environmental influences.

The sensing in FBG sensors relies on using the sensitivity of the device to changes in the refractive index of the host material. In FBG sensors the resonant condition is directly proportional to the refractive index of the waveguide. A small change in the environment, for example, a temperature drop or increase, leads to a significant change in resonance wavelength which has been used for photonic thermometry. The sensitivity of FBG sensors to small changes in the refractive index raises the question of the FBG sensor performance under harsh conditions, such as high radiation environments.

The past studies have shown that FBG sensors are fully functional for several years under exposure to radiation doses ranging from a few Gy/h to a few kGy/h. Some studies have indicated a small, but significant drifts in Bragg resonances; this suggests that the resonance wavelength redshifts with increasing dose rate, however, other studies have reported a blue shift of comparable magnitude.

Overall, FBG temperature sensors show significant peak center drift due to accumulated dose, however, the temperature sensitivity shows no changes. The changes in the measurements are assumed to be due to the complex changes in the fiber. An understanding of the changes that occur in the fiber during the exposure to radiation could enable integrated dose measurements of absorbed radiation dose with the use of appropriate correction factors.

Optromix is a fast-growing vendor of fiber Bragg grating (FBG) products line: fiber Bragg grating sensors, FBG interrogators and multiplexers, Distributed Temperature Sensing (DTS) systems. We create and supply a broad variety of top-notch fiber optic solutions for the monitoring of various facilities all over the world.

If you are interested in Optromix FBG sensors, please contact us at info@optromix.com

FBG sensors FBGs fiber Bragg grating sensors

Voltage measurements with fiber Bragg gratings

Voltage measurement is essential for many fields such as power grids, telecommunications, metallurgy, railways, oil production, etc. Voltage measurements are related to fault detection and monitoring of the state of large equipment, which is essential for these fields. As the technologies used in these fields continue to develop, voltage monitoring becomes increasingly more important to the system of fault location.

Traditional voltage-sensing devices and methods are not ideal and possess multiple drawbacks, such as:

Narrow bandwidth;
Large weight;
A possibility of combustion under heavy working conditions;
Contact sensing.

Due to the multiple drawbacks of these methods, a need for a new voltage sensor has emerged. The new method of voltage measurement needs to have good amplitude-frequency characteristics and transmission characteristics in order to build smart sensing systems.

Currently, the biggest emphasis is put on fiber optic technology. Researchers attach great importance to voltage monitoring with optical elements as they offer multiple advantages that are vital for voltage monitoring in various fields:

FBG sensors are passive;
They are immune to electromagnetic interference;
FBG sensors are compact and lightweight;
FBG sensors can be mounted on any surface;
They possess a wide sensing range;
FBG sensors are stable under high temperatures.

The use of FBG sensors for voltage measurements allows us to obtain the data of switching overvoltage and lightning invasion overvoltage, analyze the overvoltage incidents, and overvoltage mechanisms.

Optromix R&D team, established in 2004, has extensive experience in the development of fiber optic products and solutions, based on the advanced research work and patents of internationally recognized scientists. Our main goal is to deliver the best quality fiber optic products to our clients. We produce a wide range of fiber optic devices, including our cutting-edge customized fiber optic Bragg grating product line and fiber Bragg grating sensor systems.

FBG sensors FBGs fiber optic products