Evaluation of Microbend Sensitivity of Standard- and Bend-Insensitive Multimode Fibers with different Measurement Setups

摘要

The objective of this work is to investigate two of the microbend test methods detailed in the IEC technical report draft, namely the basket weave method and the wire mesh method. While the wire mesh method is applicable at ambient temperature only, the basket weave testing delivers values at both ambient temperature as well as for -40 °C. For both methods, we demonstrate the sensitivity and reproducibility. In addition, we compare the contrast of the results gained by these methods. For the tests and measurements, we mainly concentrated on the currently used multimode fiber types described in IEC 60793-2-10 [1]. This includes the fiber types Alb (62,5/125, ISO/IEC 11801 OM1), Ala.1 (50/125, ISO/IEC 11801 OM2), and Ala.2 (50/125, ISO/IEC 11801 OM3), respectively. As a contribution to the discussion of the properties of the currently widely implemented bend insensitive multimode fibers (BIMMF) of type OM3 and OM4, we included them into the examination.