The Expanding Use of Fiber Optics in Smart Cities The rapid increase in human population and humanity’s ever growing consumption of resources forced us as a whole to reconsider how we live in cities. The city could be seen as a living organism. DAS technology provides the foundation for real-time monitoring and sensing in smart…

Fiber Optic-Based Structural Health Monitoring   Fiber optic cables are used in various instrumentation applications to create sensors for different types of measurements, one of those applications is to monitor the structural health of different civil engineering structures such as buildings, bridges, tunnels etc. The structural health of an infrastructure can be described as its…

Cities, with their complex and adaptive structures, both need technology and inspire the development of technology. With their unimaginable technological developments, today’s cities are rapidly moving towards a structure that is more intertwined with the technology they are getting smarter. Within the city concept of the future, which is defined as the Smart City, all…

Optical fibers first appeared in the mid-1960s as a revolutionary means of fast and low-loss communication via a drawing glass made of silica with a dimension similar to human hair. Distributed Fiber Optic Sensors (DFOS) appeared around the same time and are a clever way of repurposing regular optical fibers to sense environmental phenomena such…

In urban environments, monitoring wide-area traffic is a crucial challenge. The effectiveness of this monitoring is critical in determining the time it takes to respond to accidents, congestion,  rock falls, landslides, and other issues. Fiber optics sensing technology can conquer this challenge with its ability to measure the vibration of passing objects along the length…

Distributed temperature sensing is the use of a whole fiber optic cable as a sensor to detect temperature changes in pipes, electrical systems, power cables etc. DTS technology is of particular interest to electrical industry since these fiber optic sensors are not affected by electromagnetic waves. So, how does this technology work? How do we…

So far, we have examined the principles of the scattered laser light in the cable; but what about the cable itself? How do we protect the ultra-thin glass fiber? What are fibers made of? Well, the optic fibers are made of either transparent plastic or glass, so that the light can travel inside the tube.…