Suppression of Fiber Fuse Propagation in Hole Assisted Fiber and Photonic Crystal Fiber

Fiber Fuse Propagation and Its Suppression in Hole-Assisted Fibers

“…In addition, several devices have been proposed with a view to avoiding the catastrophic damage caused by the fiber fuse, for example, a fiber fuse terminator using a thermally-diffused expanded core (TEC) fiber [20], [21] and a device that can rapidly detect a fiber fuse and terminate it by monitoring the light back-reflected from the fiber fuse [22]. Recently, it was reported that the fuse propagation threshold in photonic crystal fiber (PCF) [8] and holeassisted fiber (HAF) [16]- [18] can be much higher than that in conventional single-mode fiber (SMF) in the optical communication band. It was suggested that the characteristics of fiber fuse propagation in HAF are determined by the relationship between the diameter of an inscribed circle linking the air holes (c) and the diameter of the melted area (D melted ) [16].…”

Power dependence of fiber fuse propagation with a long-period damage track in hole-assisted fiber

“…A fiber fuse is a phenomenon whereby an optical discharge propagates toward a light source, and this results in the catastrophic destruction of the optical fiber [2,3]. Recently, it was reported that the P th in photonic crystal fiber (PCF) and hole-assisted fiber (HAF) can be much larger than that in conventional SMF [4,5,6]. The propagation characteristics of the fiber fuse in HAF depend on the relationship between the diameter of an inscribed circle linking the air holes (c) and the diameter of the melted area (D melted ) [3,4].…”

“…Therefore, we consider that when the input power is small and the optical discharge size (∼ D melted ) is much smaller than c, the effect of the air holes on the optical discharge is negligible, and the fiber fuse in the HAF propagates in the same way as in the SMF. However, when the input power increases and D melted becomes close to c, we assume that the melted glass covering the plasma [6] penetrates into the air holes, which results in an increase in gas volume and a simultaneous decrease in gas density. This should lead to a reduction in the temperature and a simultaneous reduction in the velocity of the optical discharge as observed in Fig.…”

Optical Fiber for High-Power Optical Communication

“…Therefore, in the near future the fiber fuse phenomenon will pose a real danger to optical communication systems constructed with conventional single-mode fibers [5]. There have already been many experimental and theoretical reports on the fiber fuse phenomenon [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21]. In addition, several devices have been proposed with a view to avoiding the catastrophic damage caused by a fiber fuse, for example, a fiber fuse terminator using a tapered fiber [22] and a thermally-diffused expanded core (TEC) fiber [23].…”

“…Recently, it was reported that the fuse propagation threshold in photonic crystal fiber (PCF) [10] and hole-assisted fiber (HAF) [18,20] can be much higher than that in conventional single-mode fiber (SMF) in the optical communication band. PCFs are attractive as transmission media with a broad bandwidth since they have unique features unavailable with conventional single-mode fiber (SMF) such as endlessly single-mode operation [25].…”