Announcements

Prof. Anbo Wang was granted a three-year NSF program to develop a new optical fiber sensor technology that will permit fully-distributed pressure and transverse stress measurement over a long span. Currently, fully distributed measurement can be realized only for temperature and strain using the Raman and Brillouin scattering in fiber. The new capability will be useful to a wide range of applications such as oil/gas downhole measurement and civil infrastructure health monitoring.

Prof. Yong Xu, received a NSF Career Award. In this five-year program, Dr. Xu and his students will develop a new method for near field microscopy that could improve the spatial resolution of current methods by at least one order of magnitude. Ultimately, Dr. Xu hopes to reach the level of 1nm in image resolution.

Profs. Yong Xu, Anbo Wang, both at CPT, Randy Heflin of Virginia Tech Physics Department and Zhiwen Liu of Pennsylvania State University were awarded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) a three project to develop a new class of silica fiber with second order nonlinearity.

Profs. Anbo Wang and Gary Pickrell, were awarded a three-year DOE project to develop a multiplexed optical fiber sensor network for the next generation high efficiency advanced power generation systems. The network will allow real-time measurement of temperature, strain and pressure at high temperatures and at multiple locations for critical component reliability and longevity. This work will be conducted in collaboration with Alstom Power.

Profs. Gary Pickrell and Anbo Wang recently received additional funding from the U.S. Department of Energy to continue the effort for the development of special holey fibers and their applications for multiple gas fast detection at high temperatures. The special holey fibers developed have been shown to be able to overcome the extremely slow response by traditional holey fiber based gas sensors. The response time can be reduced from hours to less than one second.

Dr. Anbo Wang received funding through the newly established Center of Research Excellence sponsored by Pratt & Whitney to develop multiplexed high temperature sensors for jet engines.

Dr. Anbo Wang was sponsored by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) to develop fiber optic acoustic sensors for transformer partial discharge detection.