Fiber Optic Termination - Hand Polishing

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Introduces to fiber connector termination with a hand polishing process. Machine polishing process will follow in a future video release.


Hello everyone! This is Colin.

In this video I'm going to show you how to terminate a ST connector in 7 steps with hand polishing.

Please keep in mind, this is just an overview. The process itself is much more detailed. This introduction shows you the concept of optical connector termination. There are many different types of connector designs. They require similar termination process but vary on some details.

So let's get started!


The first step is preparing your fiber for termination.

This step involves removing fiber jacket and buffer coating to expose the bare fiber. Different connectors require different lengths of bare fiber to be exposed.

Once the bare fiber is exposed, you need to clean it with alcohol as shown in the right picture.


The second step is preparing the epoxy.

For two part epoxy, you will need to remove the separator between part A and part B. Then mix part A & B thoroughly.

Once the epoxy is thoroughly and evenly mixed, you pour the epoxy into a syringe for the next step.


Step 3 is to inject epoxy into the connector body as shown in the left picture.

You should stop the injection once the epoxy forms a small bead at the tip of the connector ferrule.

Then you insert the cleaned bare fiber into the connector as shown in the right picture. Stop once you feel objection force.


Step 4 is to crimp the connector's crimp ring.

The crimping joins the connector body with the fiber's aramid yarn. So when you pull the connector, you are actually pulling on the yarn, not the fiber itself.

Step 5 is to cure the epoxy.

Up until now, the epoxy is still a fluid not cured yet. Insert the connector body into a heat oven. After a set curing time, the epoxy is cured and turned to solid. Then remove the connector from the oven and cool it off.

The connector is now ready to be polished.

Step 6 is to polish the fiber connector.

First you will need to remove the excess fiber protruding from the tip of the connector.

Then the connector will go through a 3 or 4 steps hand polishing process. The polishing films change from coarse to fine. The typically grade are 12um, 3um, 1um, and 0.05um.

Typically multimode connectors go through a 3 step polishing process, and single mode connectors go through a 4 steps polishing process.

The final step is to check whether you have done a good job.

You will need a 200 zoom level microscope for the inspection. Insert the connector into the handheld microscope. Then you can see how good is the polishing. Many things can go wrong. But after some practice, you should be able to do a very good job.

The right picture shows the end face of a perfectly polished connector. You can see that the fiber core, fiber cladding are all perfectly polished.

So there you have it. I hope you learned something from it.

We offer many free training tutorials on our web site. Check it out on fo4sale.com!

I will see you in the next video!

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• fiber optic termination
• fiber optic polishing
• st connector polishing