OPTICAL ENGEENERING Optical engineering is the field

OPTICAL ENGEENERING

Optical engineering is the field of study that focuses on applications of optics. Optical engineering metrology uses optical methods tomeasure microvibrations with instruments like the laser speckle interferometer. Optical fibers are flexible materials that can be used as waveguides, materials that can guide the direction of light. A laser engineer is a scientist or engineer who has extensive training in designing, building, operating, and maintaining high-energy manufacturing or research laser equipment. Laser engineers working in the manufacturing area create or review technical drawings and coordinate with manufacturing personnel to determine the actual stepsand type of lasers necessary in various manufacturing processes.

Advantages • • • Using fiber optics has many benefits over a copper wire, some listed below. One fiber can carry 3 million voice calls or 90, 000 TV channels (aka “broad bandwidth”) Optic cables aren’t prone to electrical problems as copper—optic cables don’t pick up other signals and they don’t conduct electricity (meaning they can be placed in a lot more variety of places and aren’t affected by a lightning strike). The light in the cables can travel much further without needing an energy boost (aka “low attenuation loss”). For example, the usual distance information can travel in copper wire without assistance is 100 m (330 ft), while in an optical cable it’s 2000 m (6500 ft). It’s harder to tap into information traveling along a fiber optics cable than down a copper one. They are also smaller, thinner, lighter, more flexible, and cheaper to make, making installation much easier (although installation costs are more than for copper wires).

Optical fiber cable • An optical fiber cable is a cable containing one or more optical fibers that are used to carry light. The optical fiber elements are typically individually coated with plastic layers and contained in a protective tube suitable for the environment where the cable will be deployed. Different types of cable are used for different applications, for example long distance telecommunication, or providing a high-speed data connection between different parts of a building.

WHY DO WE CARE? So what are fiber optics actually used for today? As I already mentioned earlier, it can be used for phone and TV cables. Those alone are a big deal, considering how much both are used nowadays. Other common applications include unmanned aerial vehicles (aka UAVs, civilian and military alike), smart highways (automatic traffic signals, for example), and some electric trains have started incorporating them, as well. And don’t forget about Christmas lights, of course. But an even bigger application is computer networking, the definition of which can be put as “a telecommunications network which allows computers to exchange data. ” You may have heard of the most well-known computer network—the Internet. With fiber optics, we now have high-speed Internet able to transport gigabytes of data on a regular basis (and petabytes of data are probably in the not-too-distant future). For those of us who remember how annoying dial-up was, we have the application of light traveling through glass strands to thank! The picture below shows workers installing fiber optic cables under the streets of Manhattan; now imagine bigger, more numerous, and more insulated cables running under the oceans so we can transmit information nearly anywhere in the world. Crazy, right? Welcome to the 21 st century, where the majority of us swear we can’t live without the Internet, and hence we can’t live without fiber optics and didn’t even know it!