MIT has a team called Mediated Matter, which is led by the brilliant Architect and Professor, Neri Oxman. Her team recently unveiled a 3D printer they developed which uses a very old, but new in the 3D printing world, material. Glass!
She stated that this technology has potential for applications on a much larger scale, like glass-printed building facades or fiber optic cables that transmit data faster. “Consider printable optoelectronics, or the possibility of combining optical fibers for high-speed data transmission by light, combined within glass printed building facades. It also hold significant implications for all things glass: aerodynamic building facades optimized for solar gain,” she said.
A type of optical fiber is the Multi-mode optical fiber, which is mostly used for communication over short distances, such as within a building or on a campus. Typical multimode links have data rates of 10 Mbit/s to 10 Gbit/s over link lengths of up to 600 meters (2000 feet) — more than sufficient for the majority of premises applications.
A ray of light in a multi-mode optical fiber, confined by the core, is called “Guided ray”. For step index fiber, light entering the fiber will be guided if it falls within the acceptance cone of the fiber that is if it makes an angle with the fiber axis that is less than the acceptance angle. Rays that fall within this angular range are reflected from the core-cladding boundary by total internal reflection, and so are confined by the core.
θ is the angle the ray makes with the fiber axis, before entering the fiber, no is the refractive index along the central axis of the fiber, and nc is the refractive index of the cladding.
The confinement of light by the fiber can also be described in terms of bound modes or guided modes. This treatment is necessary when considering singlemode fiber, since the ray model does not accurately describe the propagation of light in this type of fiber.
As always, you can try using fxSolver, with “Guided ray” equation.
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