ENGLISH COMMENTARY

1.General

It is important that it is easy to drop optical fibers from telephone poles to the home in the system of FTTH where optical fibers are constructed to customer's home.

We made a prototype of simple type mechanical splice for individual fiber which is easy to splice without tools except in stripping and cleaving fibers. We report the performance of the splice.

2.Mechanism of splicing point

Picture 1 shows an appearance of a prototype of simple type mechanical splice for individual fiber. In the splicing, index matching gel is used and fibers are aligned into a precision glass capillary. And the splicing is performed with fibers bending by shifting the glass capillary. The mechanism of bending is shown in Figure 1. Because the splice is performed by buckling the fibers, a gap between fiber's ends which is caused by thermal expansion of the materials by temperature change does not happen ,so the stable performance in temperature change can be achieved.

3. Performance

We evaluated the following using single mode fiber.

1)Splicing loss and return loss in the room temperature

2)Result of the thermal cycling test(-30degreeC- +70degreeC, 8 cycles)

Splicing loss is shown in Figure 2. Good performance was achieved. Mean value of the splicing loss is less than 0.2dB. Change of splicing loss is less than 0.1dB.

4.Conclusion

Good performance was achieved by a prototype of a mechanical splice using fiber's buckling.