Fiber Optic Sensors and Transmission Systems

About fiber optic sensors and transmission systems

Fiber optics is the technology of using light to transmit information. Light has a number of advantages over electricity as a medium for transmitting information: it is immune to corruption by neighboring electromagnetic fields, the attenuation over a given transmitted distance is much less and it is also intrinsically safe.

Fiber optic technology is used in two major ways. First, the fiber optic cable itself can be used directly as a sensor in which the variable being measured causes some measurable change in the characteristics of the light transmitted by the cable. Secondly, fiber optic cables can be used as a transmission medium for data.

This latter use of fiber optic cables for transmitting information can be further divided into three separate areas of application. First, relatively short fiber optic cables are used as part of various instruments to transmit light from conventional sensors to a more convenient location for processing, often in situations where space is very short at the point of measurement. Secondly, longer fiber optic cables are used to connect remote instruments to controllers in instrumentation networks. Thirdly, longer links are still used for data transmission systems in telephone and computer networks. These three application classes have different requirements and tend to use different types of fiber optic cable.

1. Principles of fiber optics

2. Fiber Optic Cable

3. Fiber Optic Transmitter

4. Fiber Optic Receiver

5. Fiber Optic Sensors

6. Fiber Optic Intrinsic Sensors

7. Fiber Optic Extrinsic Sensors

8. Fiber Optic Instrumentation Networks

9. Data Networks Using Fiber Optics

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