A CONTRIBUTION TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF DEVICES TRANSFORMING OPTICAL SIGNALS INTO PNEUMATIC ONES

The development of ever more refined construction techniques and scien tific research has led to a renewed interest in physical phenomena suc h as the photothermic effect, discovered last century. Using these phe nomena it has been possible to establish particular steps for transfor ming an electric or electronic signal into a pneumatic one. Once this conversion goes through an intermediate phase where the signal becomes an optical one, the transformation favours the transmission of the si gnal itself in hazardous enviroments, with explosion risk or electroma gnetic noise, and in this case fibre optics can be used. This work set s out the results obtained from a study carried out on an optopneumati c system based on the photothermic effect. It is able to be piloted by an infrared Light Emitting Diode and to be used, for the absence of e lectrical signals, in every kind of enviroments.