Tag Archives: Remote Viewing

Remote Viewing

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By: Ken Barat

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley California

An underused tool in the Laser Safety toolbox is the use of remote viewing. By remote viewing I mean being able to observe beam placement and interaction from a location other than bending over the optical table. Industrial applications are familiar and has long used machine vision tools. While in the research laboratory the application of camera viewing systems have lagged behind. Today the availability and cost of cameras to perform this task has greatly improved. Costs have gone down, and well as the size of cameras. These web cams and CCD cameras are ideally situated for the viewing of near infrared and visible wavelengths. Leading this use of remote viewing has not been the Laser Safety Officer or even laser safety firms but the users themselves.  Homemade units that combine a LCD screen and camera are a great advantage in the research lab. As opposed to the IR viewer there is no debate if one can look through the viewer with laser protective eyewear on or off. The user can, while wearing their protective eyewear, look at a fixed screen while moving around the camera or having the camera in a fixed position keeping the user far from possible stray beams. Combining with motorized mounts, we have the best of all worlds CCD’s can be as small as 1 cm square and can be fixed on any optical table. Many a computer web cam with the removal of their IR filter will provide good visualization. Parts cost for such a system can be in the $600-$700 range, depending on the quality of the camera. Another place where cameras are readily employed is where physical access to optics and reaction chambers is difficult to achieve. This application removes the user from climbing over equipment, which always presents a risk of inadvertently moving equipment to back injury to members of the work force. In biotechnology applications cameras can also be applied to microscope eyepiece systems remove the risk from back reflections through optics and giving a superior view on a monitor. There is really no excuse for microscope users to be looking down the eye pieces these days. Fiber optic users should not be examining the fiber end with a handheld viewer but rather a camera system. The presentation at ILSC highlighted not only uses and advantages of using cameras for remote viewing, but also technical short comings, in particular for some pulse rep rate systems.

 

Developing a Laser Safety Culture

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By: Ken Barat

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley California

While we have come a long way with laser technology, laser safety has lagged in one important area. Still today the most common laser incident is an individual (usually student) performing some type of beam manipulation and not wearing proper protective eyewear and being struck by a stray or direct beam. The answer is not better eyewear, which would help, nor remote viewing, which would greatly enhances safety,  but rather the LSO and their institution and Senior laser users  need to spend more time working on changing user’s safety culture, in order to make a significant impact on the number of laser accidents. Laser Safety is an achievable goal. It is a goal that is extremely important in all laser use settings, but in particular in the research setting where the laser user manipulate beams and in doing so put themselves and others at risk. A one-time fix without user buy-in will fade away as soon as the next crisis occurs or next project deadline arises. The only way to maintain laser safety in a research setting is through a cultural change that will be passed down from one user to the next. Once established, it can be sustained from one user to another. The paper presented reviewed what the author believes to be the essential steps/components in establishing a robust laser safety culture. Those elements are: Management Tone (it must start from the top and not just lip service), Institutional Training (required per ANSI Z136),  Lessons Learned Class (the value of learning from one’s peers cannot be over-estimated), On the Job Training or mentoring (this is what really keeps one safe at the work place and is misunderstood by most), Administrative Controls (most important controls in research, while Engineering Controls are the most important in Industry), Institutional Assurance (Compliance and applicability of controls needs to be confirmed) and User Actions (self assessment, stepping and seeing if one can improve their set up , housekeeping cannot be stressed enough). The only way to maintain laser is through a cultural change that will be passed down from one user to the next and becomes part of the work process, aka culture.