High-strength silica fibres in a long length coated at a speed of 5 m/s

We report the strength characteristics of high-speed coated optical fibres. We used synthetic drawn 125 ¿m-diameter-fibre silica rods coated in-line with a 50 ¿m-thick single-layer coating at a rate of 5 m/s. A 50.8 km length of fibre was drawn into sample lengths ranging from ~ 5 to 7 km from each rod. All the fibres were proof tested at three different stress levels up to 2.1 GN/m2, resulting in an average survival length of ~ 10 and 3 km, respectively, at 1 4 GN/m2 (200 kpsi) and 2.1 GN/m2 (300 kpsi).