- [Dave] Well, welcome, everybody. Thank you for taking the time to be with us on this webinar today. This webinar is being brought
to you by UC Irvine Extension, and today we'll be
talking about fiber optics and the technology in its current state. But before we get going, just wanted to give
you a little background on how the webinar works. We do have the audio lines on mute, so use the chat area on the
right side of the screen. Up at the top you'll see some tabs, and there's a chat tab and a
Q&A tab. Use either one of those tabs and make sure you've clicked it. And then you can use the area below, either at the end of the chat or Q&A, to type in any questions, and we'll be monitoring
those throughout the webinar. We really encourage you
guys to ask questions because that's how you
get a lot more value out of these webinars. I am going to now, Yu, I'm going to introduce
you on this slide, and then I'm going to hand it over to you. We are really fortunate today
to have Dr. Yu Bibby wi
th us. Dr. Bibby has a master's and
PhD from Drexel University and has over 20 years of
experience in optical engineering, and that includes things
like fiber optics, optical electrical and optical components and their system design, their modeling. She has a lot of emphasis
on the IR image technology and metrology, machine vision,
non-destructive testing, holography, holographic
memory, and diffraction. She spent a lot of time
not only in industry but also as an instructor, as a faculty member
in
the department of physics, has won several awards. And we are really fortunate to
have her here with us today. Welcome. - [Yu] Thank you very much. Hello?
- Okay. Yes, we're all here, and then you should be
able to forward the slides. - [Yu] Okay. Thank you very much for your introduction. This first page is about me. (laughs) You already hear that, so I
won't go through those, okay? And let me go to the next slide, introduction for the optic fiber. I just want to give you
people a broad revi
ew what fiber optics used
in today's technology. A lot of them you're familiar with, like telecommunication,
computer networking, and almost in our daily life, everything, cables, networking, and typically in the
communication area, for example. And now most the telephone and internet uses the optic cables. And they are, has a large bandwidth and can simultaneously carry
many, many pairs conversations. For example, one single optic fiber can carry three million
voice calls simultaneously and/or
90,000 TV channels. That's just one single optic fiber. That's why we have those
high-speed internet and communication everywhere. So this is the area a lot
of you are familiar with, and another area from a
day-to-day life you may not aware is a large application in
military aerospace applications, for example, fighter planes and the latest like F-35. And they just announced further upgrades in the optic
fiber in that particular area. And they're already using
partially optic fiber but not compl
etely switch over. So by switch over completely
to the fiber optics, they can carry large, more broadband communication technology. And that's one area military has put a lot of emphasis, of course, on satellite and
missile launch, radar system. And all of them use a lot
of optic fiber technology, and they are not just for communication, for example, for the sensor. In the missile launch, there is one particular
monitoring about hydrogen levels because when the hydrogen leaking, that's going to
cause
explosion and problems. In the past they used mass spectroscopy, and in that, the response
time is two to three minutes. So if you have a hydrogen
leak in the middle launch, and then you didn't know
in two to three minutes, maybe too late. But with the fiber optic hydrogen sensor, that can be instantaneous
because at the speed of light, it can instantaneously
report there's a leakage on the hydrogen, and therefore, it can be shut down and can take action right away. So that's very, very...
That's why the military application pushed the fiber technology
to the very, very new area. And another one in the tank, in the (indistinct) tank. And this is in progress. They replaced a couple
wires with the optic cable and just by doing that reduced the weight. From 70 tons of tank, you can almost reduce two
tons of those cable wires and all the connectors and everything. This is in progress. And in 2014, this year, they completed a prototype of the tank. In 2017, they're going to be
deliver
ed to the military. Okay, that's a very
large application area. Of course, a lot of defense
money is spent in that area. So that pushed down to
the commercial aircraft, and that has been also in the progress. It's a huge opportunity in that area. In the next couple slides, I'm going to talk about that, okay. In order to use fiber
optics in the other areas, you must use optic fiber
sensors, a connector with it, so sensor which can sense large variety, temperature, pressure,
strain, displacement,
vibration, rotation,
velocity, just you name it. Any physical parameter you want to sense, we can design a optical
fiber sensor to sense it. And the advantage is they
are very, very sensitive and fast response. Of course, development takes time, okay. And another one is the
fiber optic imaging. We probably all know this in the medical application and the industrial borescope,
industrial inspection, in inspection cameras and microscope, and all the other applications touch that area. And another
one is you can transmit power into the area specifically, for example, in the fighter
plane in the fuel tank. Current technology and
the previous technology, in order to detect the fuel level, you have to put a fuel sensor to there. But any sensor without
electricity you cannot run, so you have to run a
live wire to a fuel tank. That's very dangerous. But in the past, we do not have any choice. We have run a live wire into it. But now with the optical fiber technology, you can have the power rem
otely and then use technology,
the photovoltaic cell. Just like a solar cell, you convert the light into electricity. So you convert the light into electricity, and then in the fuel tank, you don't have live power there, which eliminated the spark
and eliminate other danger. So that's a very unique application. And oh, any other application
that have high power laser, and that's for military
use and for weapons or whether it's for the other research. And in our day-to-day life, there's a light,
lamp, signs, art, and many, many other applications. So I just covered a
little bit here, and so, there are lots of applications. Is everybody hear me okay? - [Dave] Yeah, we can hear you. - [Yu] Okay, that's good. - [Dave] Sounds good. - [Yu] All right, okay. Next I wanted to talk
what are optic fibers. Okay, we talk about,
this just very basics, and first of all, optical
fiber is just a dielectric, cylindrical dielectric waveguides. And on the left side,
this is inside the core. It's silicon.
It's different refractory index. And in the middle, this is a cladding, and outside is a plastic coating. This is a simple area for optic fiber. Give you a size dimension-wise. Inside the core is a single-mode fiber. I'll explain to you later
on what single mode. It's about five to 10 microns. What does that mean? Human hair is about 17 microns. So if it's a single-mode fiber, it's like many times less than human hair. Human hair is about 70
microns, plus-minus. For multi-mode fiber, and the cor
e is about 100, 120
microns, something like that. So that give you a size-wise about that. So most the light, all
the light, actually, transmitted through this single core, and the outside is called the cladding. It's just a boundary, bind the
light inside the core, okay. In our fiber communication,
optic fiber core, so we're going to study more detail. This is just basically introduction. So typically used, optic
fiber has three types. There are many more types. But in the communication,
typica
lly using multi-mode fiber. In the sensor, typically
use single-mode fiber and also graded-index fiber. What that mean is that inside the core, refractive index is different
from outside the cladding. So that bundled the light
traveling through inside. Okay, like this picture
is multi-mode fiber, and the diameter is
about 120-some diameter. And then light, you can transmit
many mode, which is many. Each mode, it's one
wavelength or one frequency. That means for a multi-mode fiber, one single fib
er you can
transmit simultaneously. three million different mode, depend on the design, which
is by the refractive index and also by the size of this core. Okay, and for the grading index, index change gradually. Okay, step index is just
one single refractory index in the middle and another
refractory index at the cladding. But a graded-index is gradually
changing refractory index. So this is just the basics, okay? Now, next slide. Let me see. Here we go, okay. This give you a little more backgr
ound and basics in the theoretical. Each fiber, this is
multimodal fiber, okay? 2a is just diameter of
the inside of this core. And any light travel through within this acceptance angle
will be propagated through, like this green light
and this black light. And if the light enters optic fiber outside this acceptance core, and it will leak out. It will be propagating. So in other words, there is a condition here what
can be propagated into it. And the V is mode condition. If it's single mode, the
n this parameter refract the index of the core and the cladding, and the diameter of the fiber
has to be less than 2.4. That gives you definition
of a single mode. If this is more than 2.4, and then this give you number of modes. That's depend on... When this increase, this
increase dramatically. So this is just the basics that we don't go through
all details, okay. Next I'm going to talk about
the fiber optical potentials in the commercial airplane application. This is currently in any airplane
. It's about like, for example, Boeing 737 aircraft have 74
kilometers of copper wires. And the larger one, 787,
has over 100 kilometers for copper wire cables and 3,500 connectors which connect the cable
segment from one to another in 40,000 cable segments and aircraft weight of 252 tons, okay. And a reduction... This is a study. All this data is from Boeing, okay. 700 pounds on a Boeing 37-800 would result 0.5% reduction in fuel oil. And another statistic shows that airlines use about 40%
of t
he retail ticket price to pay for the fuel in 2008. Now it's even higher, okay. Let's assume we can replace,
eliminate, 60,000 copper wires, and the reduction of this is
going to be 42,000 pounds. In the next couple slides
later, I'll have data here. For each of the... For each kilometer of the copper wires, there's about 200 kilogram of the weight, which for the optical fiber
cable is only 6.5 kilogram. So it's about 30 times
reduction in the wire. So just by replace 60
kilometers of copper wir
es, and then we can lose about 42,000 pounds. And then that's converted to this, will be 30% reduction in fuel oil. And then that's about
12% of revenue increase for the airline and not
mention to other benefits, communication and all the others. So this is a huge potential for the commercial airlines to apply. In the military application,
they're already starting. Like I mentioned early, there's
some latest fighter plane. The F-35 is already starting
to completely convert to the fiber optical a
pplication. In the past, they had partially used fiber optical communication. Next slide. Okay. What need to be done in the
commercial airplane application? That's a huge undertaking. In this past October, I attended the SPIE conference, and in there is one of the, two or three talks of some Boeing company. They mentioned that they are
starting in this direction. It had take them seven years
just to make this decision to try to move in that direction. They haven't, not starting yet, but they are
trying to
move in that direction because there's lot of
things need to be done. First of all is the cost. In order to completely switch to or partially switch to
the optic communication, you have to do a lot of things. And also it's a highly... Safety and reliability is a huge issue, so I'll talk little bit later. Okay, so first of all, if they replace the optical fiber cable, and that way, they have to do, they have to replace all the connectors, connect the fiber optic. And then they have to
use
all the optical fiber sensors because if you connect, in the current situation,
different sensor, temperature sensor, pressure sensor, velocity, or whatever, they use the electric or
different way to sense it. Once you switch to the
fiber optic communication, all the sensors have to be switched. That's not an easy task. For example, just to give you one example for fiber optical sensor
in the fuel level, in the fuel tank, you have to constantly monitor
what's your fuel level. And technology
is exist. The fuel level is.... Fiber optical fuel-level
sensor is very easy to make, but for it reliable in the harsh environment, and the airplane is considered
a harsh environment, so you have to go through lot of testing. Their current testing procedures is first put the fiber optic level sensor in a tank, just a fuel tank,
not even in the airplane. It have to be there for,
I believe it's 18 months or a year and a half or two years to make sure it's constantly
running, reliable safety-wise,
and nothing cause problem. And then after you go through that stage, what you have to do is put a
fiber optical fuel-level sensor into the airplane, but the airplane cannot be taking off, has to be sitting in the
ground for another 18 months or two years to do all that
testing, that second stage. And then next stage
will be on the airplane and actually fly. So right now, I believe
the fuel-level sensor, they are on the second stage, which is sitting here in a fuel tank. The fuel tank sitting in
the airplane with all the airplane conditions and then go through that testing process. So as you can see, that
take a lot of effort, takes a lot of time and lot of money. So this is one thing why it take so long, but they are moving in that direction. So, in another words,
it has a lot opportunity for people working in this field. In the next decade or so, there are many, many needs
in the optic fiber area, lot of technical field work in this area. Next thing, you have to
replace the computer.
Older computer use the copper wires, and then with the new computer,
use optic fiber cables for the communication. Theoretically, you could
retrofit the older computer, but that's just not a viable way because older computer
use the copper wires. The signal is different even
though it is electric signal, but the voltage and
other things is different with optical fiber cables, and it's just very different. So you have to replace all that. And now, of course,
it's a new light source, whether it's
laser, LED
or any other source, typically laser source,
different wavelengths, frequency. So, you have to replace that. And now also you have the... There are a whole nother
area of the detectors, signal receivers, the processors. All this has to be done, okay. And also another big area is safety and reliability standards
need to be established. So this has not established, and so it's still in
the very infancy stage in terms of fiber optic
communication in the aerospace. I'm sorry, in the comme
rcial aircraft. So this is just one of the areas. Next one, this is just some pictures. Okay, on the left side,
you see this is a cable, current copper wires sitting in the fuselage of airplane, some in the wing tips, the tail,
and the body as weighted... I did the calculation. It's weighted about 20 tons of just copper wires. And if you replace with fiber optic, this is very unique-looking, and there's a single mode fiber, okay. And that yellow is single-mode fiber, typically for the sensing,
v
ery sensitive sensor. And then there's two
other different type of... Red is one, and another one
is a 60.2 to 120 microns. The first number indicate the core, and the second number in
there's cladding, okay. Another one is 50, inside
diameter's 50 microns, and the outside cladding is 125 microns. Still, it's about the size
of the human hair, okay. And then this is fiber optical bundles. So each of this has
many, many optic fibers, not just one, okay, and they put many, many
in just a bundle ove
r here and then outside the
plasti is wrapped around. And then this is the connectors. Okay, I'll go next slide. So this is a cable, okay. Here's a comparison, okay, between fiber optic cable
versus the coax cable. And this data is taken from SPIE conference this
just past August by Boeing. They presented there, okay. Coax cable, first look at the representative distance, the
bandwidth the products, okay, and there's five times better, and single mode is 1,000 times better. Okay, attenuation, th
at means how far it can go
without pumping more energy because there's a loss
during the traveling. And here's greater than 45 dB, and there's only one dB. It's 45 times better. In the single-mode fiber,
it's 225 better, okay. And then cost is nine times better, okay. And diameter is the, this is the cable, okay? Cable is very (indistinct). Each cable here is, this is 25 millimeter, and this is six millimeter, but this carries a lot more information. Weight-wise, look at this. Okay, each kilomet
er of
the cable is 200 kilogram. Here's a 6.5 kilogram. These our data early, number date early. For the Boeing 787, it has 100 kilometers of cable, copper cable, which is 20 tons, okay. By reduce, I mean replace
even half of it whenever, we can reduce 30 times
of the weight, okay? That's a significantly savings of just about everything, okay. So as you can see, all the data, all the parameters indicate much better
performance with optic fiber, whether it's single mode or
whether it's multi-mode
, okay. So, next slide. This is some examples of standard fiber optic interconnector. Okay, this is one segment of cable, another segment of cable, and then in the middle is a connector. So you connect, join
these two together, okay. And then the optic signal, or whenever the signal
is passing through this, okay, connected. The connector technology is critical for the application,
aerospace application, okay. Let me explain to you, okay. This is just middle part of the connector, and this part i
s the
optic cable with the end. And this side is optic
cable with another end. Okay, in order to have a good connector, there are two methods right now using. One is a physical contact, okay. Another one is non-physical contact. Each of them has an
advantage and a disadvantage. I'll explain, okay. Physical contact, basically, you just glue those two together. This side is one cable with a end, okay, and this side is another cable, fiber cable with another end. You glue this together. This has ad
vantage, disadvantage. Another way to connecting this is use a non-physical connect contact. At the end of each cable, there's a micro lens attached to it. So this micro lens expanded
the beam to a parallel beam, and on the other side you
have to do the same thing. So, light comes in this direction, expanded like a parallel beam, and then it coupled completely into... I say coupled completely, and it still has some insertion loss but can be connected and
connecting into this one. Okay, so this i
s two method. Let me give you a few more examples here. This is direct physical contact. It's a socket. There's a pin. Okay, so this connecting to this pin, and in there, the end of
optic fiber is a cleave. They're called a cleave, actually just use a special
tool to cut it very smooth. And then these two, when
they connect to each other, this is like a screw almost. Connecting each other is a screwed-end, and this surface that's connected
matches perfectly, okay? And this has been existing tech
nology, and many of telecommunication perfected this method. There are a lot of them
using this, okay, connecting, and this is the connector. And a lot of times you need a joint, and that joint can also be like... In the middle, you can use a joint and then connecting those two together. Okay, this is the physical contact. So between them, there is glue. There's a matching refractory index glue to join this together. Advantage is that when
you disconnect them, when you want to change it, you hav
e to really
physically break this, okay. Another type, this is
non-physical contact. Basically you have two micro lens, one on this end, expanded beam, one on the other end receiving the beam. Okay, so there's all the examples of it. And then it will connect it. And this is a very easy
connect/disconnect. This is some of the examples. For example, this one is
testing the water bath, and it has very good insertion loss, and this is some of the examples there. And here it goes through the testing,
and they put in the mud and then disconnect and make
sure it still can be used. Here's some comparison between
these two type of connector. You can see each has
advantage and disadvantage, and the most advantage for the nonphysical contact one is disconnect and connect
cycle can be very excellent and easy to do. So that's the comparison between the two. Each of them has different
places to use it, okay. Both category can be
used in the application. Next big area you have to replace in the comme
rcial application
is optical fiber sensors. And as we mentioned earlier, it can have pressure sensor, temperature sensor, fuel sensor, acceleration, velocity, whenever, and can be all used, optical
fiber, okay, sensor to do it. What is the optic fiber sensor? Basically you have a
light source come to you. You have an optic fiber here. And then you have a sensing element with external parameter you want to sense, whether it's velocity or temperature, for example, given temperature. And when the t
emperature changes, and then this will affect
this element, sensing element. Sensing element can be fiber itself or can be a attached element. I'm going to explain
that a little bit later. So when there's a temperature change, it will cause the parameter
of the light to change. And on this side, you can detect a change. And then once it detected a change, it convert it to a signal processor. It can decode another change. That's the basic principle of optic fiber, is about this. And also optic fi
ber have two type, you know, in terms of how it is sensing. One is called extrinsic, means the sensing element
is not optic fiber. It's attached to optic fiber. So you have an input optic fiber. Fiber carries light, and
then sensing element happens. In the sensing element, once that light has been modulated by the external parameter, the light coming out of this element back to the output fiber,
and it goes to the detector. So, this is extrinsic. Basically sensing takes place
outside the optic f
iber. And another one is called
intrinsic optical fiber sensor, and the fiber itself
become a sensing element. So light comes in with
intensity, frequency, or for polarization or
the other parameters. When external activation, for example, whether it's
temperature or pressure or velocity, acceleration,
rotation, whatever, it cause the light propagating
the sensor to get changed. So when it come out of this
side, it detected that change. So that's a basic principle,
optic fiber sensor. Let me giv
e you a very simple
example what can be modulated, what can be detected. Intensity, for example, light intensity, the beam strength or
amplitude, that can be changed. And the face or interferometer method or wavelength or frequency,
it can be changed. Or polarization can be changed. Or any other way can be changed. Okay, this box is an intrinsic sensor. That means the light never
come out of optic fiber. Light comes in here,
go through optic fiber, come this side, and detects it. And this is a t
emperature sensor. What's designed in this
segment of optic fiber, it go through a clamp and the support, and it just go through like this. And the top, there's a bio metal strip. It's one side, the metal, this yellow one, and the green one has a
different thermal expansion rate. That means when the temperature change, this piece of the metal is going
to bend one way or another. It'll press down or release this way. So when that changes, the
optic fiber gets bent. When the lights bending
too muc
h, it's called... And then the light is going to leaking out of the optic fiber, go through from that, and that reduce the intensity
detected in this area. So you can convert in that
change of the light intensity to how it's correlated, the temperature. So this is one example. This is intrinsic. The light goes through it without... You get out of the fiber being
detected outside environment. Another one, this is
called external sensor. Light optic fiber comes
in, cable here, comes in, and then s
hine to this part called the compression plate. This is a element. This particular element is
made of photoelectric material. What that means, when
external pressure change, it compress this block. When it compress, the
light polarization state is going to change. When the polarization state change, and the lighting coming out of this direction will be
different from light goes in. So therefore, then you can
detect there's a pressure change. But this is another example of that, okay. There are m
any, many
different ways to design. Just about any parameter you can think of, you can design an optic
fiber sensor to detect this. There are millions of
different parameters. There are many, many
applications you can found. Okay, so there's just couple examples. So basically, fiber optic sensor used in aerospace applications
for fiber optic gyroscope, which is rotational sensor. And this is based on the principle when the light is
rotating in one direction, when the fibers coil in a circle in t
he direction of rotation, the light speed coming
in the directed rotation, it's different from against
the light direction. For example, if the coil is rotated clockwise, and then the plane is rotated
clockwise in that direction, and then on the clockwise direction, the light propagated will be different from the light propagated clockwise. When you make this three dimensional, that means X, Y, Z coordinate, and then basically you can send all three dimension, the 360 degrees, the changes. So th
is has been very
successful application in aerospace, in the
missile, in the satellite. They have been all using
this fiber optic gyroscope. And then there's another
one, acceleration sensor, speed sensor, oxygen-level
sensor, hydrogen-level sensor, fuel-level sensor, temperature,
pressure, deformation. And then that means a slight distortion of a particular area, a strain,
force, or many other areas. There are just tons of them in there. So that's all this has been. All this technology is
avail
able in different areas, for example, temperature sensor, pressure sensor, strain
sensor, force sensor. They all have been used in
the industry, different areas, but to use them in the airplane, that has gone through, that has been, that need to be tested for reliability, for the consistency, and everything and many many... This has to be retrofitted
to the airplane, so that's a huge task and also a huge opportunity for the commercial
airplane in application. Now, fiber optic sensor technologies
, there's extrinsic sensor. External sensor, I'll put that way. External optic fiber
sensor can sense linear and angular position, pressure. In the box is the method of the sensor. Like, for example, the
reflection and transmission, it can can sense pressure,
flow, and damage. And this method, total
internal reflection, it can sense liquid
level and pressure, okay. And the evanescent wave, which is wave propagated
outside the cladding, not in the core, it can sense temperature, strain, humidity,
bacteria
growth, all the... Okay, and there's
another, doppler, in fact, and they can sense flow measurement. There's grating. It can sense pressure,
acoustical vibration. And then there's absorption,
and it can sense temperature. Photoelastic effect, it can
sense pressure, acceleration, vibration, rotation position. Okay, just many, many of them. And then there's a few other
area of optical imaging, okay. That's the external
fiber optic sensor, okay. It can do all that. For example, what can
b
e used in the aerospace in the aircraft, you have to determine
whether to use this method, whether to use this method. Fluorescence, for example,
whether you use this or use that depend on... All this can be used as temperature. So in the development,
they have to determine, technicians or scientists, technicians determine which one can be better used. And there are many temperature sensors and which one can be used or more reliable be used in
that airplane application. Okay, and this is intrins
ic
optic fiber sensor. The microbend like I explained earlier, which senses strain, pressure, vibration, and Rayleigh scattering,
which measure temperature, external refractive index change. And this is Raman scattering, which can sense the temperature, mode-coupling which also can sense this. Distributed sensor and can sense all that. And there's also interferometric sensor and can many, many more parameters. That's next page. Interferometric sensor,
optical fiber sensor, it use the property of
optical face. So when you sense the optical face change, and the many parameters can
be sensed like the rotation, acceleration, strain,
acoustic, wavelength, magnetic field, current. And this is the... Sagnac is a main, which is what I explained early, when fiber rotating one direction, and the light propagating in that direction will be different from the light that
counterclockwise rotates. So that can be designed to many sensors. And there's another,
Mach-Zehnder interferometer or Michelson
interferometer. This just use the name of
the optical technology. Polarization, and that's
another technology. So therefore, many sensors,
many optical fiber sensors, can sense one same parameter. It's just a matter of design restraint and reliability
consideration and stability. All this can be, that's in the design. So, advantage to use the optical
fiber sensor is passive. It's all dielectric. There's no electric spark and everything, lightweight, small size, and typically the size
reduced dra
matically compared to current
technology, non-fiber optics. Immune to electromagnetic interference, this is very important
because there are some area all the other sensors use electricity, and then it causes crosstalk
interference each other. But with optic fiber sensors, okay, they will cut down that
and basically eliminate that. And the high temperature performance, this has been very critical as well, especially in the engine area and if a regular sensor will fail. And with optic fiber
senso
r, it can perform well. Large bandwidth, that's
very, very important because with the new technology, new communication technology,
the copper wires and cables, it just cannot be able to
carry those bandwidths. And with lot of fiber optic communication like I mentioned earlier, each single fiber like
the size of your hair can carry nine million
simultaneous talk, telephone talk, or 90,000 television channels, which that means with the audio and video. So that's very, very
impressive and very use
ful. Environmental ruggedness
for vibration and shock and high sensitivity,
extremely high sensitive. Electric and optical multiplexing, this is very important for the optical fiber technology applied in the airplane. And the reason is in the past, one single copper wire
only can carry one signal. For example, I'll just
give you an example. It may not be exactly. If you sit in the airplane,
you push the button, and then that one signal
goes to the cockpit. That's one single signal that
you push
a button, a light, or you push a button. You call the flight attendant. And then that's one
wire carries down there. 200 passengers, then it's 200 wires. You have to use 200 copper wires because it cannot distinguish one another. But with the optic fiber, it has technology called wavelengths, wavelength division. It's called wavelength
division multiplexing. What it's testing basically is differentiate a different wavelength. You can carry the same
signal in one single fiber, use a different wav
elength. And also it also can tell you at a different distance, it
can carry different signal and without interfering each other. So each single fiber
carry all the signals. And another thing is the
component cost driven by the larger commercial telecommunication and the optical electronic market. Once more and more people
use optical fiber systems and the more technology developed, the cost is driving down dramatically. So this is an advantage
using optical fibers. In summary here, with the
fib
er optic technology, lightweight, small size. Optic cable offers a significant size and weight savings to
meet the harsh environment in aviation applications. And high speed and the
high data rate, this is... In electromagnetic field,
radio frequency field immunity, and that's very important, okay. No grounding or shorting connection. You don't need to ground, okay. Low cost and low power,
that's very important too, low power compared to the
signal it require, okay. Easy for installation, upgrad
ing without replace cable harness. Basically it's a connector. We reconnect the signal of cable. And high reliability and low environmental sensitivity. What it means is that in each of the optical
fiber sensor design, it only sends to that
particular parameter. So with other interference,
it will not affect it. So basically this summarize
all the applications of future applications in
fiber optic communication on the commercial aircraft. And this is just the beginning in this industry, and lot
of this technology
is already exist. It's already applied in the military, but right now it's just maybe adopted in the aircraft application. I guess this is basically my talk, and the next
page is about our program. Dave? - [Dave] Yu, thank you very much, and that was a great summary
of fiber optic technologies. We wanted to give you guys a go, answer a few questions and give you guys a
little bit of a background on what's available for you
out here at the university in case you wanted to go
in
to this a little bit more. A couple of the questions
that came up was, "Well, you know, I like all this stuff, but I want to try to
get into this industry, and how do we do that?" And I'm going to skip
forward a slide or two. If those of you are interested
in getting into optics, maybe you already have
some exposure at work, we highly suggest you get into some of the industry
society meetings. And we've listed several of them up there, the Optical Society of
Southern California, the OSSC. There'
s a website right
there, right there. And there's also SPIE and
The Optical Society, OSA, and then the Optical Institute
of Southern California. You don't have to go to
all of those meetings, but you might want to pick one or two. And typically they have a meeting. Most of them that are local will have a meeting once a month, and this is a really good thing to go to if you're looking at to
getting into this area or even just trying to
expand your network, which is always a good thing. You know,
get to one of those meetings, talk to people, interact with them, and remember their names, maybe even hook up with them on LinkedIn 'cause those are the ways
that you can kind of move into these industries if
you're not already there. Again, as Yu had pointed out, this is a very strong
industry with a lot of growth in jobs at a lot of different levels, both at the technician level and then at the PhD level on research. It's a lot of fun things going on here, whether it's medical background or w
hether it's aerospace, like you mentioned in the airplanes, you know, trying to reduce weight, a lot of fun stuff going on. And even out to the commercial lighting, lots of great research and opportunities for
small companies to come up, and you'll see these things going. So the way to get your ear
to the pulse of this, again, is to get to some of those
meetings and meet people. That's really the absolute best way. And one of the other
questions was related, you know, how to get these jobs. And
again, that networking
is absolutely the key to getting those jobs. You know, you want to not only give yourself
some goals like, you know, "I want to find another
20 people in this industry in the next month or two." Give yourself some very clear timelines and a goal for building your network. And then use that network. You know, invite people to lunch maybe at a company that you're thinking that you might want to work for, and maybe one of your
friends knows somebody there. Well, get an introd
uction
from one of your friends. Don't be asking for a job, but say, "I want to know
what it's like to work at Edwards Life Sciences. Can I buy you a Subway sandwich?" And most times people
will respond to that, but then you've built a connection within a company that
does a lot of optics. So keep that in mind for anything to do with building out your career. Now I'm going to back
up just real quickly. We just got a couple minutes
left, but I want to back up. The other thing that is
valuable is
taking courses, and the university offers
two sets of courses, one in optical engineering and the other one in
optical instrument design. You see the two of them here. If you go up to our website
under Extension under optics, you'll see both of these programs with a lot of the detail
described here on these two pages. But I'm going to just briefly show you what these programs look like. We do try to give people both,
mostly practical experience. 'cause most of 'em have
had the theoretical stuff
in a physics class or in
other engineering classes. So we try to pull in the specifics, which is, this is optics now. We're only focusing on optics, and we're trying to come at it from a very practical point of view. We will use industry standard software such as Zemax in these programs so you get a lot of exposure there. And what we do in the first
set of courses is start you off with the required courses
for optical engineering. And again, that's system lens design, intro and advanced lens des
ign. And again, these programs, and somebody already asked this question, "Well, do I have to sign
up and submit GRE tests and commit to a big program?" And the answer is no. These are individual courses. If you finished out the whole program the way we defined it
here and on the next page, then you can get a certificate
from us, which is great, but you don't have to commit to that. You know, come in with a single course, see how it works for you. Almost all of our students
are working adults. T
hese are all online classes. They're still a lot of work, but they are online and fairly flexible for people to work into their schedules. If you're brand new to optics or can't remember your
physics from either college or maybe even high school, we would recommend you start
with these prerequisites. If not, if you've had some experience, then you can jump into
these required courses for the two different programs. The ones that you see in yellow are the ones that are coming up in our next quart
er. The University of California
is on the quarter system. That's 10 weeks. So our next quarter is winter. It starts in January, and the quarter after that is spring, starts in late March, early April. And then we go through the
summer as well with the summer and then a fall quarter. We'll drop down real quickly. I'm not going to go through all of these, but for the program in
optical engineering, you've got a bunch of
choices for electives. We just talked a lot about
this particular subject, in
fiber optics, and then same thing for the
instrument design program. Here's the electives. The ones in yellow are the
ones that are coming up in our next quarter again, and you can see there's a lot of variety in those electives based
on what your background is. If you're not sure
about any of this stuff, you know, give us a call out here. If you go onto our website again, you'll find our contact information, and we can give you a lot of guidance. We talk to people all the time. We talk to empl
oyers all the time. We have a strong, a very strong group, advisory board members
from industry and academia. We have actually one of the
best programs in the world in this area that's a
short certificate program. And many of our students have
articulated these courses into master's degree programs at prestigious universities
like the University of Arizona and others. So this is a very, very strong program, and if there's anything
we can do at all to help, we talk to people in different
stages o
f their careers. Some people are unemployed and trying to figure that part out. Some people are right out of school, and they can't figure out
what kind of job to get with a generic engineering degree. And we know how to talk to
and guide all those people because we're connected to
this industry quite well. So please use us as a
resource if we can do anything to help you out guiding your
career and moving you along. And again, regardless of whether
you take a class from us, we'd be happy to chat
with you. One of the missions of the
University of California is to educate and maintain
a strong workforce for the state of California,
and that's why we do this. But with that, I just want
to say thank you very much to Dr. Yu Bibby for this presentation and all the work that you've done for us. We really appreciate that,
building the new course. And thank you to all of you guys for taking the time out of what
was probably your lunch hour if you're out here on the West Coast. We appreciate tha
t. And please again, if there's
any questions at all, feel free to contact us, give us a call. You will be getting a recorded version of this if you missed anything up front. And again, if you need anything at all, just go under the University
of California Irvine or just UCI under Extension, and you will find everything
about us for contact. We'd be glad to help. All right, well with that, just have a great afternoon, everybody, and thanks again, Yu. - [Yu] You're welcome. Thanks.
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