Testing of optical fiber components for harsh environmets

Abstract

Optical fibers provide many benefits to the telecommunication systems and their usage has more and more current even in the avionics industry [1]. It offers an attractive solution for airplanes, such a replacing copper conductors to reduce weight of the plane, electro-magnetic interference, bring high-speed communications connection, implementation of optical sensors, etc. Nevertheless for extremely high requirements on safety it is also necessary to precede all inflight influences. For summary of potential threats see e.g. [2]. One can easily found a several conditions of a harsh environment or an unfriendly fiber surrounding which could have a fatal impact to the transmission characteristic as attenuation statistics leading to link drops, time jitters or pulse degradations in time domain. There are different temperature gradients on the deck through which the infrastructure can pass while experiencing differentiated degradation and thus changed conditions within a physical layer. This paper is focused on an analysis of temperature-depended influences on insertion losses and other parameters of optical connectors, combining two types of multimode fibers, purposed for installation within an aircraft optical network.