3SAE Combiner Manufacturing System (CMS)
What Is It?
The Combiner Manufacturing System (CMS) is an optical fiber glass processing system designed to maintain production level repeatability for fiber optic combiners and other fused optical components. The CMS includes fiber optic tapering, fiber optic cleaving, fiber optic bundling, and fusion splicing of fiber optics utilizing 3SAE’s Thermally Stabilized Ring of Fire® Plasma Technology and achieves the industry’s best optical performance, process cycle times, and component cleanliness.
Why Is It Better?
The Combiner Manufacturing Station (CMS) utilizes 3SAE’s patented Ring of Fire® heat source that provides circumferential heating around the fiber or optical component being processed in the Combiner Manufacturing Station (CMS). This allows for even heating around the optical fiber as well as very narrow heat source along the axis of the optical fiber. The Ring of Fire® heat source is capable of producing heat widths as small as 300um which is ideal for splicing Photonic Crystal Fibers (PCF) with little or no collapse of the inner air clad structures. The Ring of Fire® arc can also be pulsed to increase mechanical strength of Photonic Crystal Fibers (PCF) while not allowing the heat to absorb or penetrate the inner structure. The Combiner Manufacturing Station (CMS) utilizes 3SAE’s patented Ring of Fire® technology to create even heating which produces uniformly shaped fiber optic tapers. Additionally, it performs world class end cap splices utilizing circumferential heat uniformity while minimizing mechanical stresses induced by other non-thermally symmetric heat sources.
The Combiner Manufacturing Station (CMS) can also operate in partial vacuum which is advantageous in producing adiabatic fiber optic tapers. Operating 3SAE’s patented “Thermally Stabilized Plasma™” in partial vacuum allows the width of the plasma field to expand up to 10x along the axis of the fiber. Heat sources with a wider heat profile are better for tapering and bundling of optical fibers because the pull distance per unit time is distributed over the molten region in accordance with the profile. Narrow profiles create modulations and stress concentrations that induce optical losses. Our wider plasma field flattens and reduces the frequency of modulations resulting in optical losses of less than 1% in fiber optic tapers.
As the Plasma is thermally stabilized, any other process variation such as electrode wear, will adjust the plasma volume rather than altering its temperature. For this reason, “Thermally Stabilized Plasma™” has 10X thermal repeatability as compared to any preexisting arc technology and is also programmatically adjustable in width and intensity.
An additional benefit of operating in partial vacuum is oxidation of the electrodes is minimized during the fusion splicing and fiber optic tapering processes. This results in virtually debris free fusion splices and fiber optic tapers. High power test data has proven the Ring of Fire® does not contaminate the fiber optic glass surface, eliminating the need for etching and reducing the cost of production and rework.
Table based tapering method allows the flexibility of a syntax based software program to create a custom fiber optic taper program while using a simplified LabVIEW based GUI. Alternately, programs such as “MATLAB” or Microsoft Excel can be utilized to develop custom fusion tapering programs.