Advantages of plastic optical fiber

Compared with traditional electrical (copper) cable communication, optical fiber communication has three major advantages: one is large communication capacity; the other is anti-electromagnetic interference and better confidentiality performance; third, it is light in weight and can save a lot of copper, such as laying 1000 kilometers long Compared with laying 8-core cables of the same length, the 8-core optical cable can save 1,100 tons of copper and 3,700 tons of lead. Therefore, as soon as the optical fiber and optical cable came out, they were welcomed by the communications industry, bringing a revolution in the communications field and a wave of investment development. Although the quartz (glass) fiber has the above-mentioned series of advantages, it has a fatal weakness that is low strength, poor flexural resistance, and poor radiation resistance.

Compared with quartz optical fiber, plastic optical fiber is one of the materials used in the information industry with theoretical research significance and application prospects in the field of polymer science for more than 20 years. It has the following characteristics:

(1) The diameter is large, generally up to 0.5~1mm, and the large fiber core makes the connection simple and easy to align, so that cheap injection-molded connectors can be used, and the installation cost is very low;

(2) The numerical aperture (NA) is large, about 0.3-0.5, and the coupling efficiency with the light source and receiving device is high;

(3) The materials are cheap, the manufacturing cost is low, and the application is wide.