Sep 24 2010
Luna Technologies, a unit of Luna Innovations Incorporated, proclaimed the release of their innovative Optical Backscatter Reflectometer, OBR 4600.
The OBR 4600 furnishes enhanced diagnostic and evaluation potentiality to the optic fiber developers, fabricators and installers by providing sensitive measurements and advanced resolution to optical fiber systems and grids with a length of about two km. The OBR4600 series enhances the calibration speed in comparison with its previous versions and the novel spot scan feature facilitates the consumer to calculate only the target area on the optic fiber. This advanced speed characteristics will inturn improve the sensing ability of the company’s products.
The Optic-fiber connection systems and the fiber grids serve a wide range of applications in various fields such as telecommunications, military avionics, commercial purposes, fiber optic medical catheters etc. The OBR 4600 is capable of inspecting these optic assemblies and networks by combining the device’s improved sensitivity, distance range and spatial resolution, which can not be achieved by other devices like the Optical Time Domain Reflectometers (OTDR). It also distinguishes Insertion Loss and Return Loss of each connection independently.
Two-fold speedy calibrations can be performed with the normal working mode while the novel scanning mode performs ten-fold rapid measurements. Thus the fiber with a 30m length can be calculated with a spatial resolution of 10 microns within seven seconds. The spot scan feature enables rectification and calculation of about one to two meters of fiber fragments at 3 Hz frequency.
Apart from all these, the instrument uses the optic fiber for performing whole distributed sensing. With the advent of accurate Rayleigh scatter technology, the OBR detects any sort of strain or thermal fluctuations along the entire 70m length in the fiber with a few millimeters of spatial resolution. The applications covers structural status monitoring, distributed thermal monitoring, identification of structural disorders in composites and load testing.
Source: http://www.lunatechnologies.com