Specialty Optical Fibers Handbook

The target audience for this chapter is the end-user (i.e., the engineer who

needs to specify a hermetic fiber to solve a reliability problem). The different

materials that have been evaluated as candidate hermetic coatings are described

to give historical perspective. However, the primary emphasis is on carbon-

coated hermetic fibers, because this was the primary type of hermetic fiber as

this chapter was being written. The chapter describes the primary reliability

risks—fatigue and hydrogen losses—and how these problems are solved using

hermetic fibers. The processes used to deposit carbon coatings onto fibers are

discussed, as are some of the material studies done to characterize the nature of

the carbon structure in carbon-coated fibers. Measurement ...