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Current Events

3.30

Creating a Sustainable Society

3.16

Sustainable Energy Engineering

2.28

National Science Foundation Day

2.17

Reformulation-Based Approaches to Query Optimization

2.15

FREEDM Day

2.10

WEST: Cloning Data Cache Behavior using Stochastic Traces

2.09

Computer Vision and Image Analysis in the Study of Art

2.08

GSA Social

2.03

Skewed functional processes and their applications

FREEDM Seminar: Optical Sensors for Energy Systems

Energy strategy is often complicated by the entanglement between energy supply security, economic growth sustainability and climate change.  This complexity compels energy systems to operate at higher temperatures toward greater fossil fuel efficiency with lower greenhouse gas emissions. Meanwhile, this trend imposes a great challenge to the applicability of traditional sensors in the harsh environments associated with the energy systems.

This talk will give an overview of the optical sensor research at Virginia Tech’s Center for Photonics Technology. These sensors include silica and single-crystal sapphire fiber based sensors for various physical and chemical measurements.  A recently demonstrated technology for fully distributed physical, chemical and biological sensing will also be discussed.  Some of the sensor applications to various energy systems will be presented.

Biography
Anbo received a Ph.D. degree in optics from Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China in 1990.  After spending 3 years in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Virginia Tech as a visiting scholar, he then joined the faculty of the same department.  He created the Virginia Tech Center for Photonics Technology from scratch in 1997 and transformed it to today’s more than 30 people and $5M of annual research funding.  He is an author of 5 book chapters, 270 journal and conference papers and 18 U.S. and foreign patents with 12 licensed to industry for commercialization. He received an R&D 100 Award in 2004 for the invention of self-calibrating interferometric optical fiber sensors for oil downhole applications.  He is a Fellow of the International Society of Optical Engineering (SPIE) and DOE NETL Residence Institute Fellow.  Anbo currently holds the Clayton Arye Endowed Professorship.