ABSTRACT
Fibers, when spliced, suffer a splicing loss because they differ from each other in refractive index, physical properties, and dimensions and also because they offset, tilt, and undergo end separation during splicing. Fusion splice is a method of splicing fibers by heating their end surfaces and fusing them together. A cable with a large number of optical fibers can be joined very easily in a short time if some fibers can be spliced in a group. The stripping of the coating material is very important to the automatic process. Single-mode fibers to be spliced are inserted in a precision-made glass terminus and bonded together with an ultraviolet-curable adhesive. The change from the fusion splicing machine for single fibers to that of multiple splicer; progress from the splicing of multimode fiber to that of single-mode fiber; and improvement of the processing technology before and after splicing.
