Specialty Optical Fibers Handbook

cause swelling of the coating, which may then be stripped off with no strength

reduction. There are also a number of thermal strippers available on the market,

which can produce quite acceptable stripped fiber strengths.

Park et al. [60] described an interesting and quite different approach. Their

stripping technique makes use of the fact that the primary and secondary

polymer coatings on dual-coated fiber have distinctly different properties. By

rapid local heating, the compliant primary coating will rapidly expand and

effectively ‘‘explode’’ the more brittle primary coating with a resultant rather

small decrease in fiber strength.

24.5.2 Fiber Cleaving ...