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Australian Congress on Applied Mechanics
30th November 2017
The 9th Australian Congress on Applied Mechanics (ACAM9) was held in November at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney. Engineering Photonics was represented by Edmond Chehura who was invited to present his work on fibre Bragg gratings for structural health monitoring.
The conference provided an international forum for researchers, industry practitioners, engineers and postgraduate students to promote, exchange, and disseminate recent findings on contemporary and wide-ranging topics in applied mechanics.

Sydney harbour bridge.
Delegates were provided with site tours of the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation’s synchrotron facility and UNSW’s centre for automated manufacturing of advanced composites, as well as a banquet dinner on a cruise ship in the Sydney harbour.
Edmond’s invited talk was titled ‘Structural monitoring using in-fibre Bragg grating sensors’ and discussed Engineering Photonics’ expertise in the monitoring of a range of processes such as manufacturing, structural testing, and materials characterisation. His talk had particular emphasis on novel case studies in the process monitoring of advanced fibre-reinforced composites. Examples included an aircraft tail-cone assembly and superconducting magnet systems that were monitored using optical fibre sensors that were capable of multi-functional and multi-parameter measurements.

Sydney Opera House.
Photonex 2017
26th October 2017
In October, the Engineering Photonics team attended Photonex 2017; the UK’s premier showcase event for photonics and light-based technologies. The event was held at the Ricoh Arena in Coventry; home of the Wasps rugby team and Coventry City football club.
We were one of more than 90 companies and institutions exhibiting and were there to demonstrate some of the optical sensing and measurement solutions that we have been developing. The systems on display were the same as those presented at the trade show in Munich earlier in the year with the addition of a dual-channel swept source optical coherence tomography system for measurement of flow velocity in micro-fluidic channels.

The Engineering Photonics stand at Photonex ’17
More details on the individual demonstrators can be found here.
In addition to the trade show, the event hosted The Enlighten Conference, which included over 120 speakers in 15 programmes. Engineering Photonics had three talks in the conference, all within the Optical Metrology for Manufacturing programme.
‘Position measurements for manufacturing applications using range-resolved interferometry’
T. Kissinger
‘Dual-plane optical coherence tomography imaging for velocity measurement in small-scale flows’
E. Rigas, J. M. Hallam, H. D. Ford, T. O. H. Charrett, and R. P. Tatam
‘Laser speckle correlation sensing for industrial robots’
T. O. H. Charrett
Baltic Cruise
August 2017
Ralph attended the European Advanced materials congress which took place on a ship that sailed from Stockholm in Sweden to Helsinki in Finland.
Multi-plane optical coherence tomography imaging for micro-fluidic velocity measurement
E Rigas, J Hallam, H D Ford, and R P Tatam
Presented at European Advanced materials Congress, Sweden, August, 2017.
Winner of the best poster
Laser: World of Photonics, Munich 2017
17th July 2017
In June, 8 members of the Engineering Photonics team attended the Laser World of Photonics trade show in Munich. This is one of the world’s largest trade shows for optics and photonics and is held biennially at Messe München to the east of the city. This year there were nearly 1,300 exhibitors and more than 32,000 visitors.
We were there to exhibit a series of demonstrated experiments from a range of research areas within the group, including wavelength control, optical gas sensing, fibre-based interferometric sensing, and laser speckle odometry. More details on the individual demonstrators can be found here
After a hot and tiring first few days setting up the stand and all the demonstrators, we were finally ready to begin the show. Although we were dwarfed by the Hamamatsu stand opposite, ours looked very impressive and professional by the time it was completed. The stand was very popular and we had many visitors, both new and well-known, from companies and universities around the world. It was a job to keep track of all the business cards that we had acquired!
In addition, the trade fair is held in conjunction with the World of Photonics Congress which holds a number of conferences including SPIE Optical Metrology, and CLEO. The group had three talks in the conferences presented by Thomas, Vangelis, and Tom. Details of the talks are provided below.
It was a very busy week but we still found plenty of time to enjoy the sights of Munich and the Bavarian beer and sausage!
Conference presentations
Laser speckle velocimetry for robot manufacturing
T O H Charrett, Y K Bandari*, F Michel*, J Ding*, S W Williams*, and R P Tatam
Presented at Optical Measurement Systems for Industrial Inspection X (Part of SPIE Optical Metrology), Munich, Germany, June 2017
Proc. SPIE 10329 Article number 103291Z (2017)
*Welding engineering and laser processing centre, Cranfield University, UK
Interferometric fibre-optic curvature sensing for structural, directional vibration measurements
T Kissinger, E Chehura, S W James, and R P Tatam
Presented at Optical Measurement Systems for Industrial Inspection X (Part of SPIE Optical Metrology), Munich, Germany, June 2017
Proc. SPIE 10329 Article number 1032925 (2017)
Microfluidic velocity measurement using dual-plane optical coherence tomography imaging
E Rigas, J M Hallam, T O H Charrett, H D Ford, and R P Tatam
Presented at the Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics, Munich, Germany, June 2017
Photonics West, San Francisco 2017
28th February 2017

San Francisco skyline from Yerba Buena island. (photo © Dan Francis)
Photonics West, the world’s largest multidisciplinary event for optics and photonics with over 20,000 delegates, was held at the Moscone Centre in San Francisco from 28th January to 2nd February 2017. Engineering Photonics was represented by Daniel Francis and Sergiy Korposh (now a lecturer at Nottingham University) who presented their work at the BIOS conference which specialises in biophotonics, biomedical optics and imaging.
Dan presented work on spectroscopy for point-of-care diagnostics using mid-infrared quantum cascade lasers and Sergiy presented a paper on biomedical application for optical fibre sensors.
- Mid-IR spectroscopic instrumentation for point-of-care diagnosis using a hollow silica waveguide gas cell
D Francis, J Hodgkinson, C Walton, J Sizer*, P Black+, B Livingstone+, D P Fowler, M K Patel, and R P Tatam
Presented at BiOS (Part of SPIE Photonics West), San Francisco, USA, January 2017
Proc. SPIE 10072 Article number 1007209 (2017)
*Bedford Hospital, UK, +Cascade Technologies, UK - Biomedical applications of optical fibre sensors
S Korposh*, S-W Lee+, S W James, R P Tatam, and S P Morgan*
Presented at BiOS (Part of SPIE Photonics West), San Francisco, USA, January 2017
Proc. SPIE 10111 Article number 101112Y (2017)
*University of Nottingham, UK, +University of Kitakyushu, Japan