Fiber Optic FAQ's

In a perfect world, there would be ONE polishing procedure. In this ideal world, you could follow a standard “recipe” to implement your fiber optic polishing process – and following this recipe would make implementation quite fast and easy.

Manufacturing fiber optic cable assemblies, a relatively simple step can have dire consequences if not done accurately. This is true for crimping. During the fiber termination process, proper crimping techniques are critical to ensure you achieve a durable connection.

When looking at the bigger picture of our industry, it has become clear that cabling and connectivity go hand-in-hand as a SYSTEM. Connectivity is integral to helping our industry do more – and do it faster.

The biggest single concerns are in how the fiber will react in termination processing either for connectorization, preparation for fusion splicing, mechanical splices or sealing into an enclosure or furcation tube.

The cleanliness of the connector is paramount to guarantee end face quality as well as the quality of the optical signal.

The MT plastic material requires fibers to protrude between 1 to 3.5 microns in height. The only way to achieve this is to etch away the thermoset or thermoplastic material from the fibers.

Good cleaning techniques throughout your polishing process will directly impact the quality of your process and extend the life of the lapping film.

It important to consider that when stripping multi-layer cables for connectorization, each layer must usually be stripped individually, as they all usually need to be stripped to different lengths.

Proper curing temperature profile. In most cases, cable assembly manufacturers are curing by placing their room-temperature product into pre-heated curing ovens—quite a thermal shock.

When fiber optic cable assembly houses set up a new polishing machine and establish their polishing process, they often find that film slipping or coming off the pad is an issue.

One of the concerns with automation in the optical fiber industry is that you want a stable technology.

In standard Singlemode cable assembly, the two wavelengths used for Insertion Loss testing are 1310nm and 1550nm.

Most polymer plastics are inherently isotropic (that is, that is they have no directionality in their optical properties).

Without question, good stripping techniques in your fiber optic cable assembly process are imperative. What happens if you damage the fiber during this production step?

Yes and in theory, this ensures connectors will be sufficiently clean for installation. However, there are a number of ways in which the end-face can (and do) become contaminated along the way:

Color variation from batch to batch is a non-issue. Since epoxies are manufactured in batches, the raw materials used by manufacturers to synthesize the epoxy are subject to small variations.

To ensure optimum performance between mated pairs of APC connectors, it is important that the ferrule endface geometries meet or exceed industry-accepted endface geometry standards (1).

When clean end-faces should be inspected at the installation site. It is always highly recommended to visually inspect the connector end-faces at the installation site, immediately prior to installing into any adapters.

The advantage of using coated flock pile pads

Fiber Optic Center offers several epoxies for single mode and multi-mode products. Refer to the “Chart of Epoxies for Single Fiber, Single Mode and Multi-mode Terminations” to review epoxy properties that will support your specific application.