Austin Tech Firm Scores License From NASA To Commercialize Advanced Fiber Optic Technology
28th September 2012 · 0 Comments
4DSP (www.4DSP.com), a technology design company with offices in Austin and the Netherlands, recently announced today it is officially launching live industry demonstrations of licensed NASA fiber optic sensing and 3D shape rendering technology that it licensed from the giant space agency.
The company plans to introduce the new technology into several industries including aerospace, medical devices and oil and gas. The company is also betting that live Internet demonstations of the advanced fiber optic technology, which is perfect for 3D shape-rendering and strain measurments, will encourage product designers from all kinds of engineering backgrounds to figure out as-yet undiscovered product applications.
Pierrick Vulliez, founder and CEO of 4DSP, likens the stage of development to the advent of the personal computer in the early 1990s.
“We are betting that the product’s potential is truly huge as real-time 3-D rendering and sensing becomes a must for the next generation of product development,” Vulliez said. “From making wings on commercial or unmanned drone aircraft to helping keep oil and gas pipelines monitored for dangerous levels of strain or heat, the NASA technology promises to be a huge leap forward in sensing technology.”
Despite other competitors in the same field that 4DSP is entering with its recently acquired license, Vulliez believes that his company’s technology solves a major stumbling block experienced by existing ones, which is the ability to enable real-time data analysis and 3-D shape rendering along the fiber optic line. Vullies notes that the NASA fiber optic technology is as much as 20 times faster than all other technologies currently available.
“Since time is money from a design perspective, the ability to get real-time data will collapse the design process for many industrial products,” he said. “Having real-time fiber optic sensing ability along a cable embedded into a fixed aircraft wing could help prevent accidents that occur from stress and strain to the wing over time. Drilling for oil thousands of feet underground could become much easier to chart and direct compared to existing technology, which could shorten the exploration time it now takes to find productive oil resevoirs.”
In short, faster is better, especially if it is also more accurate. Much like Moore’s Law, which predicted that chip performance, and the resulting processing speed of computers, would double every 18 months, many traditional technologies could be about to experience a quantum leap forward if 4DSP continues to promote the NASA 3-D rendering and sensing fiber optic technology.
Ladies and gentlemen, please fasten your seatbelts and move your trays to an upright position.
