Coated optical fibers for high-strength fusion splices

Suitable fiber-coated structures and a practical splice technique which are superior in both long-term reliability and splice operation efficiency in the field are required. A splice technique without using any dangerous chemical acids to remove the primary coat and coated fiber structures are proposed in this paper. With these techniques, an average strength of 0.88 GPa for bare fusion spliced fibers is obtained in the field, which is more than double the value compared with the average strength of 0.4 GPa obtained by the conventional splicing technique, which is used practically in the field. In addition, the splice time decreases to about one-third of the conventional splice time. The splice operation efficiency improvement is recognized for not only coated mono-fibers but for fiber ribbons.