Splicing of bendinsensitive fibres

Abstract:
During the past few years new singlemode fibres have been developed and presented to the market which exhibit lower bending loss than common singlemode fibres, socalled "bendimproved" or "bendtolerant" fibres. Recently a new “bendinsensitive” fibre type has been developed, which reduces bending loss by more than an order of magnitude compared to bendtolerant fibres while being backwards compatible with standard singlemode fibres. This has been achieved through nanoStructures(TM) technology, enabling fibre optic cable designs that bring optical cable installation on par with copper communication cables. Since these new fibres differ in structure from standard singlemode fibres, modifications in some fusion splicing processes become necessary. Investigations of suitable fusion processes and the results are presented.