Short Courses

SC186 Hands-on Specialty Fiber Splicing

Tuesday, February 26, 2:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.
Clyde J. Troutman; 3SAE Technologies, USA

Level: Advanced Beginner (basic understanding of topic is necessary to follow course material)

Course Description
This course provides a hands-on introduction to fiber fusion splicing for production applications. The course will begin with a classroom presentation that will introduce attendees to the technical issues, requirements and methods of preparing, splicing and testing a variety of specialty fibers. Thereafter, a hands-on lab session will provide every attendee with an opportunity to use modern preparation, splicing, and measurement equipment to replicate typical processes used in the photonics industry. Fibers spliced will include standard Single Mode, Multimode, Polarization Maintaining (PM) and Erbium fibers.

Benefits and Learning Objectives
This course should enable you to:

• Identify specialty fibers and their splicing requirements.
• Discuss fiber preparation for the manufacturing environment including stripping, cleaning, cleaving and handling disciplines.
• Determine the selection criteria for optimization of splicer/splicing programs.
• Compare splice alignment methods, including Fixed V-Groove, Cladding and Core alignment.
• Describe specialty splicing including mode matching and PM splicing.
• Describe how non-reflective attenuators are built with fusion splicers.
• Compare splice protection methods including sleeve and recoating techniques.
• Explain splice quality estimation and measurements using insertion loss techniques, tensile strength testing and PM extinction ratio.

Intended Audience
The course is designed for engineers and lab technicians working in fiber optics research and development or manufacturing. Participants should have a basic understanding of fusion splicing and an interest in any of the fore mentioned objectives. Following the presentation, participants will be divided into small groups and split between stations, each with a specific focus, for example, SM, PM or Erbium. The groups will be rotated between all stations.

Instructor Biography
Clyde Troutman is an optical applications engineer with 3SAE Technologies. He received his bachelor's degree in optical engineering from the University of Alabama in Huntsville in 1999. He has been highly involved in specialty fusion splicing and teaching fiber optics training classes since 2000.