TRANSFORMING OUR FUTURE: Photonics for intelligent transport

TRANSFORMING OUR FUTURE PHOTONICS FOR INTELLIGENT TRANSPORT

At the University of Southampton’s Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC), our researchers are working on a range of technologies to support the aims of the UK Government’s Industrial Strategy. The primary objective of the Industrial Strategy is to boost the nation’s productivity by enabling businesses to create valuable jobs and increase earning power through investing in skills, industries and infrastructure.

The Industrial Strategy’s ‘Future of Mobility’ Grand Challenge embraces numerous modes of transport and technologies from autonomous vehicles and drones, to smarter trains and ships, and their associated sensing and control systems. We are confident that the technologies developed by the ORC will enable the smarter use of vehicles and logistics infrastructure, helping to achieve lower emissions and higher engine efficiencies whilst reducing manufacturing and operational costs.

Our research has great potential to make a significant contribution towards nextgeneration mobility. Examples include using LIDAR and multi-wavelength sensing to optimise vehicle traffic density and systems for monitoring engine performance and the environment. Each of these solutions depends on the cutting-edge photonics sensing technologies and fabrication processes that we are pioneering.

Smarter and safer structures Future oil tankers and cargo ships will be designed to operate as unmanned Autonomous Surface Vehicles (ASVs) to help reduce both running costs and risks from piracy. Our researchers have pioneered a technology to monitor stresses, strains, temperature and leakage over a ship’s entire structure using optical fibre. This breakthrough allows us to measure these essential parameters at individual one meter intervals over tens of kilometres of fibre.

The optical fibre functions both as a sensor and the medium used to transfer measurements from the ship to a central interrogating unit. Therefore, by attaching the fibre on the hull, the strains and stresses along the entire length of the ship can be measured in real time, with performance data collected from across the entire vessel simultaneously.

Our system allows the critical parts of any ship to be monitored remotely with high precision.

Using this technology, a single monitoring unit can interrogate some 100,000 points at the same time without the need for any electrical wiring. This Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) technology could equally be deployed in road traffic monitoring.

“This technology will have a positive economic impact on both consumers and the transport industry. The first prototype will be ready for field trials within 1-2 years.”

Dr Ali Masoudi: sensing unit optical fibres

Dr Ali Masoudi

Connected and autonomous vehicles

More efficient and cleaner engines

Our researchers are developing a lowcost CMOS photonic integrated chip for air and land-based applications in Laser Imaging Detection and Ranging (LIDAR), LIFI (wireless communication between devices using light) and remote sensing.

Optical sensors are ideally suited for aerospace as they can operate in extreme environments, for example near the engine, fuel tank and skin of an aircraft. They are also lightweight and so add minimal mass whilst offering rich quality data.

This work will enable improvements in sensing and connectivity for autonomous vehicles, including helping to enable internetconnected vehicles using high-speed LIFI technology. Our CMOS-based photonic materials offer all the benefits of integrated photonics, with an extended wavelength range and high-power transmission capabilities.

We are currently working with industrial partners to develop opto-avionic systems and multi-parameter sensors to monitor fuel quality and engine performance. Using broad bandwidth and high-speed optical fibre networks and enhanced sensing capability, we can begin to identify faults before they occur and recommend adjustments to increase flight efficiency. The ability to produce these predictive analytics will be an essential feature of future autonomous flights and ground support.

“Our work opens up capabilities for a single low cost sensor to provide 3D mapping, remote sensing and high speed communication.”

Dr Frederic Gardes

Addressing the need for compact, low cost and mass-manufacturable systems for the automotive industry is also a priority for our silicon photonics research. Our technologies will also be widely transferable as solutions for environmental monitoring and industrial process control. We are working at the interface of electronics and photonics to investigate methods of fabricating devices which can sense longer infrared wavelengths (up to 14 microns), and can detect many different sorts of molecule, a key capability for environmental monitoring and healthcare technologies.

“We are developing sensors that are economical to produce, compact and far more sensitive.”

Professor Goran Mashanovich

“Through the power of light, we are making aviation safer and greener.”

Dr Christopher Holmes

Ready for all conditions We are developing new types of bespoke chalcogenide glasses which transmit both in the visible spectrum and far out into the midinfrared (mid-IR) range. Devices based on these materials can capture wavelengths of between three and eight microns, useful for detecting certain toxic materials. They can also operate in the eight to 12 micron range used in the thermal imaging of human subjects.

Thermal imaging is of major interest in the development of autonomous vehicles, for example in vehicle-mounted control and safety systems. Our researchers are currently discussing thermal imaging capabilities with a number of UK companies, including SMEs and large multinationals, with the aim of using the materials we have developed for lenses and sensors with the capability to ‘see’ in the dark.

“Considering an autonomous vehicle, its sensing systems will need to be able to detect in both visible and thermal wavelength ranges, which is exactly what our dual function materials can do.”

Professor Dan Hewak

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Contact us: +44 (0)23 8059 4521 light@orc.soton.ac.uk Optoelectronics Research Centre, Building 46, University of Southampton, Highfield Campus, Hampshire, SO17 1BJ www.orc.soton.ac.uk www.photonicshubuk.org @orctweets @orcsouthampton