DEVELOPMENT OF NEW OPTICAL FIBER FUSION SPLICER FOR FACTORY USE

摘要

Recently, the demand for optical fiber modules has increased, and various kinds of modules are being manufactured. These optical fiber modules consist of many kinds of specialty fibers. Specialty fiber is generally difficult to splice. Therefore, difficult requirements for splicing these fibers are increasing as new fiber types are introduced. Standard fusion splicers have been developed for field-use in order to splice a few types of common telecommunications fiber. However, these splicers are unsuitable for splicing specialty fibers. Therefore, a new fusion splicer for specialty fiber splicing has been developed. The new splicer is specifically designed for factory use for production of optical fiber modules. Various improvements have been applied to this splicer in order to splice specialty fibers with low loss and stable splicing performance regardless of operator skill. The splice loss estimation has also been improved. This splicer estimates the splice loss by taking various factors into consideration. Therefore the risk of unacceptable splices has been decreased.