Polymer coatings serve to protect the glass fiber during fiber optic cable production, installation, and maintenance operations. Optical fiber coatings are designed to adhere to the glass fiber for mechanical reliability and satisfactory lightwave transmission performance, and they are also required to be easily strippable. The coating removal is most often accomplished by means of mechanical stripping tools that, if not used properly, can mechanically damage the fiber and weaken it. Although a large embedded base (multibillion-dollar) of fiber optic cable exists in modern telecommunications networks as a result of nearly two-decade deployment of telecommunications optical fiber, a reproducible quantitative method for the evaluation of strippability of fiber coatings is still needed. In this report, we present the results of evaluations of mechanically and chemically stripped fiber surfaces by using AFM (Atomic Force Microscopy). For a quantitative assessment of fiber surface cleanliness after mechanical stripping, we examined the surface of hand-drawn silica fiber before and after extended exposure to laboratory air followed by dry/solvent cleaning processes. While freshly hand-drawn fiber exhibited the smoothest surface, acid-stripped fiber that was rinsed with reagent grade acetone gave a fiber surface that ranked second in surface roughness to the hand-drawn fiber, thereby quantitatively confirming the effectiveness of solvent cleaning of stripped fiber surfaces.
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