Facilities

The Centre houses state-of-the art equipment for optical fibre devices and sensors design, fabrication and characterisation. The Centre has 90 m2 of dedicated laboratory space in the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering. The state-of-the-art facilities in the laboratory include:

• Numerical analysis, computer simulation and device automation (electromagnetic simulation, photonics design, optimisation and instrument control/automation commercial software (OptiSystem, Rsoft, LabVIEW, MATLAB, COMSOL) deployed on a number of high-spec workstations.
• Basic building blocks:
  • Six optical tables dedicated to fibre optic experiments
  • Six work benches for fibre processing, sensor fabrication and inspection
  • A wide range of high precision motion controllers, goniometers, fibre alignment stages, miscellaneous optical elements
• Core optical test and characterisation equipment:
  • Optical sources and polarization controllers: two high-spec tunable lasers (Nettest 1560 & Anritsu MG9638A); Thorlabs fibre coupled laser source S1FC635, fibre coupled SLD source; CS2010 LED source for UV packaging; two fibre coupled broadband visible sources; high power 980 nm fiber coupled LD, Thorlabs inline polarimeter; POL controller; TXP 5004 controller.
  • Optical detectors: Two optical spectrum analyzers (Agilent 86142B & Advantest Q8384); PXIT RXIR-800A power meter, PXIR optical power meter, PXIR variable optical attenuator; wide range of fibre coupled photo detectors, Ocean Optics visible range miniature fiber spectrometer.
  • Optical microscopes: high precision optical polarizing microscope, two basic optical microscopes and three digital microscope cameras for fibre alignment/inspection.
  • Other test equipment: Temperature controlled humidity chamber, a range of temperature controllers, high temperature oven, miniature vibration generator, high DC voltage (up to 1000 V) power supply, and broad range of electronic test equipment.
• Specialist fabrication equipment: MTI VTC-100 vacuum spin coater, NTT microheater & motion control system for fabricating microfibre/nanowire fibre structures; composite embedding setup for manual layup method, sputter coater, polymer electrospinning setup.