Luna Technologies offers OBR 4600 Optical Backscatter Reflectometer

SEPTEMBER 19, 2010 -- Luna Technologies has launched of the latest addition to its Optical Backscatter Reflectometer product line, the OBR 4600. The OBR 4600 product is designed to provide advanced diagnostic and inspection capabilities to fiber-optic manufacturers, developers, and installers by offering ultra-high resolution, high sensitivity measurements of optical fiber assemblies and networks up to 2 km in length.

Luna says the OBR 4600 instrument offers a substantial increase in measurement speed over its predecessor as well as a new “spot scan” option that enables the user to measure only a specific area of interest on the fiber. The improved speed will open up new opportunities for Luna’s distributed sensing capabilities, the company beleives.

The OBR 4600 instrument is engineered to offer the ability to examine optical networks and assemblies with a combination of spatial resolution, sensitivity, and distance range that is not currently possible with other instruments, such as optical time domain reflectometers (OTDR), according to Luna. The OBR 4600 enables users to troubleshoot, inspect, and locate faults point by point in an assembly and characterize the return loss and insertion loss of each interface individually. The sensitivity and resolution of the OBR instrument enables users to easily measure and distinguish between a loss at a coupler, a splice, a bend, or a connector, Luna says.

With the new version of the product, measurements can be taken more than twice as fast in the normal mode of operation and over ten times faster in the new fast scanning mode, Luna asserts. With this capability, 30 m of fiber can be measured with 10 micron spatial resolution in less than 7 s, Luna says. With the new “spot scan” option users can troubleshoot and measure short segments of fiber (1-2 m) at repetition rates of up to 3 Hz.

In addition to troubleshooting, inspection and testing capabilities, the OBR 4600 instrument also provides a tool for fully distributed sensing using standard optical fiber as the sensor. Via measurement of the Rayleigh scatter reflected from the fiber, the OBR instrument can determine the strain or temperature changes along the length of the fiber at any point up to 70 m in length with a spatial resolution as fine as a few millimeters, according to Luna. Applications include load testing, structural health monitoring, detection of structural defects in composites, and distributed thermal monitoring.

Luna’s new OBR 4600 instrument is available now and will begin shipping in October.

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