UNIT-II

FIBER MATERIALS
 FIBER MATERIALS
• The materials used for fabricating
optical fibers must satisfy a number of
requirements in which some are listed
below.
• 1) light propagating in a fiber requires a
small change in refractive indices of the
core and cladding ,hence two materials
that are transparent in the operating
wave length range is required.
• 2) The dielectric material used should
have a very low attenuation of 4 db/km
particularly in the operating wave
length.
• 3) The materials used for fabricating core and cladding layers
should possess required mechanical and thermal properties.

• 4) In order to obtain very large bandwidth fiber >5GHz, the

fibers with very low diameter should be fabricated.
 GLASS FIBERS:
• Glass is generally made by fusing mixtures of
metal oxides ,sulfides ,selenides, etc.
• The fibers are made up of silica (sio ) which hasa
2

refractive index of 1.458at 850nm sio2..

• 1.Doping silica with Geo2 ,p2o5 increases the
refractive index.
• 2.Doping silica with B2o3 decreases the refractive
index.
• Properties of silica are,
• 1.good chemical durability.
• 2.high transparency both in visible and IR
region.

ISO 9001 : 2008 certified

 HALIDE GLASS FIBERS:
Fluoride glasses belongs to a general
family of halide glasses in which the
anions are form elements in group vii
of the Mendeleev's period table ,
namely fluorine ,chlorine ,bromine .
1) ZBLAN is used to form high refractive
index core of fiber material.
2) zrf4 is replaced by HAF4 to get less
refractive index cladding of a fiber
material.
ACTIVE GLASS FIBERS:-
• The glass fibers allow the material to
perform amplification, attenuation and phase
retardation on the light passing through it.
• Doping can be carried out for both silica and
halide glasses.
• Commonly used materials for fiber laser are
erbium and neodymium.
• By examining the absorption and
fluorescence spectra of these materials, one
can use an optical source which emits at an
absorption.
 PLASTIC OPTICAL FIBER

• The growing demand for delivering high-speed

services directly to the workstations has led
fiber developers to create high-bandwidth
graded-index polymer(plastic) optical fiber for
use in a customer premises.
• This fibers are hence refer to as PMMA POF &
PEP POF, respectively.
• Compare with silica fiber, the core diameter of
plastic fibers are 10-20 times larger ,which
allows a relaxation of connector.

ISO 9001 : 2008 certified

GENERAL CAUSES
OF SIGNAL
ATTENUATION
 ATTENUATION
• Attenuation means loss of light energy as the light pulse
travels from one end of the cable to the other.

• It is also called as signal loss or fiber loss.

• It also decides the number of repeaters required between

transmitter and receiver.

• Attenuation is directly proportional to the length of the cable.

 ATTENUATION
 Attenuation is defined as the ratio of optical output power to
the input power in the fiber of length L.

 α= 10log10 Pi/Po [in db/km]

where, Pi= Input Power

Po= Output Power, α is attenuation constant

ABSORPTION
LOSSES
SCATTERING
LOSSES
RADIATIVE
LOSSES
DISPERSION