Fiber Optic Center has a team of technical experts and marketing strategists with decades of years in the field. This team contributes to the fiber, cable and specialty industries coverage through news, alerts, reports and general media information.
Fluorine gas can be introduced to assist with the glass vaporization (internal surface layer removal) to provide a very clean surface for deposition. In addition to the oxygen flow for pressure control, fluorine gas will accelerate glass vaporization at high polish...
Focus on preventive action, not corrective action – As you develop your fiber optic polishing process, I encourage you to implement a statistical process control system.
For example, over time, rubber pads and fixtures will wear out, and yields will begin to...
Cleaning is critical – The act of polishing removes material, similar to sanding wood.
To prevent contamination, it’s vital to thoroughly clean the fixture and ferrules between every polishing step.
Contamination causes scratching and will negatively impact...
When looking at adding optical fiber processing to a cable plant or adding a different product line such as tight buffer, one needs to be very thoughtful in several categories such as which product will be optimized, Product run time or change over time and what the...
This mainly applies to fixtures for polishing ferrule only (as opposed to connector polishing). The ferrules must protrude the same amount from the bottom of the fiber optic polishing fixture, to ensure consistent pressure being applied to all...
Another application that noticed a great advantage of using the laser cleaver is fiber bundles. As multiple large fibers and significant amount of epoxy forces the manual cleave being far from the ferrule tip, the laser cleaver will “cut” in multiple scans from...
Solution doping adds erbium and other rare earths into a glass core. If the ratio of the doped core to the preform outside diameter is too large, undesirable optical properties will be obtained. Correcting the incorrect ratio will also yield more drawn fiber....
The first widely used connector in the data world, at least in North America, was the ST, sometimes called Snap and Twist. This connector dealt successfully with many of the limitations of the SMA. Ceramic ferrules could be molded and machined with the submicron...
Setting up a new bonding process and need to establish the curing schedule or your production process is set but experiencing fiber movement and need to adjust curing temperature or time, here is a FOC TIP to validate your curing schedule:
Build in buffer time –...
Spring-loaded connectors rely heavily on the projected and calculated spring force of each connector after primary polishing to ensure firm mating inside the split sleeve of the adapters. If a connector was over-polished (in excess of 3 times from the beginning) for...
