Plastic Optical Fiber Sensors cover the fundamentals and applications of a new class of fiber sensors. With contributions from leading academics in the area, this book covers the theory of plastic optical fiber sensors or (POFs), as well as applications in oil, gas, biotechnology, and energy fields. Using multiple examples, the editors showcase the advantageous characteristics of POFs, such as ease of handling, large diameter, inexpensive peripheral components and simple termination tools. By doing so, the editors assert that there has been a proliferation of the use of POFs in new consumer products. The book also highlights uses for building various products, such as a POF sensor for oil trucker valve monitoring, a monitoring system for high voltage substation switch, an oil leaking sensor for offshore platforms and a solar tracker for illumination. Including over 300 black and white images, this book would be highly beneficial for professionals in manufacturing as well as academics in universities, particularly those who use optical fiber sensors on a regular basis.

Popular Science gives our readers the information and tools to improve their technology and their world. The core belief that Popular Science and our readers share: The future is going to be better, and science and technology are the driving forces that will help make it better.

Hervorragender Überblick über die Verwendung von Kunststoffen in der Photonik, speziell in der Datenübertragung. Der Leser erfährt, wie die photonischen Eigenschaften von Polymeren mit ihrer Struktur zusammenhängen und wie POF für den Einsatz in optischen Netzwerken optimiert werden können. Im ersten Teil des Buches werden typische Fasern in Hinblick auf Materialklassen und Ausbreitungsmoden vorgestellt. Optische Eigenschaften wie Bandbreite und Leitungsverluste werden diskutiert, ebenso Ausbreitungscharakteristika und deren Einfluss auf die Leistungsmerkmale der Fasern. Im zweiten Teil werden unterschiedliche Methoden der Herstellungs und Charakterisierung präsentiert. Mit Bezug zu den technischen Anforderungen der optischen Kommunikation konzentriert sich das letzte Kapitel auf die Vorteile und Einsatzmöglichkeiten von polymeren optischen Fasern.

This research- and application-oriented book covers main topical areas of optical fibers. The selection of the chapters is weighted on technological and application-specific topics, very much a reflection of where research is heading to and what researchers are looking for. Chapters are arranged in a user-friendly format essentially self-contained and with extensive cross-references. They are organized in the following sections: - Optical Fiber Communication | Editors: Ming-Jun Li and Chao Lu - Solitons and Nonlinear Waves in Optical Fibers | Editor: Boris A. Malomed - Optical Fiber Fabrication | Editor: Hairul Azhar Bin Abdul Rashid - Active Optical Fibers | Editor: Kyunghwan Oh - Special Optical Fibers | Editors: Perry Shum and Zhilin Xu - Optical Fiber Measurement | Editor: Jianzhong Zhang - Optical Fiber Devices | Editors: John Canning and Tuan Guo - Optical Fiber Device Measurement | Editor: Yanhua Luo - Distributed Optical Fiber Sensing | Editor: Yosuke Mizuno - Optical Fiber Sensors for Industrial Applications | Editor: Tong Sun OBE - Polymer Optical Fiber Sensing | Editor: Ginu Rajan - Photonic Crystal Fiber Sensing | Editor: D. N. Wang - Optical Fiber Microfluidic Sensors | Editor: Yuan Gong

Within the past few decades, information technologies have been evolving at a tremendous rate, causing profound changes to our world and our ways of life. In particular, fiber optics has been playing an increasingly crucial role within the telecommunication revolution. Not only most long-distance links are fiber based, but optical fibers are increasingly approaching the individual end users, providing wide bandwidth links to support all kinds of data-intensive applications such as video, voice, and data services. As an engineering discipline, fiber optics is both fascinating and challenging. Fiber optics is an area that incorporates elements from a wide range of techno- gies including optics, microelectronics, quantum electronics, semiconductors, and networking. As a result of rapid changes in almost all of these areas, fiber optics is a fast evolving field. Therefore, the need for up-to-date texts that address this growing field from an interdisciplinary perspective persists. This book presents an overview of fiber optics from a practical, engineering perspective. Therefore, in addition to topics such as lasers, detectors, and optical fibers, several topics related to electronic circuits that generate, detect, and process the optical signals are covered. In other words, this book attempts to present fiber optics not so much in terms of a field of “optics” but more from the perspective of an engineering field within “optoelectronics.