How Do Fiber Optic Cleavers Precisely Cut Optical Fibers in a Flash?
What is optical fiber cleaving? Simply put, optical fiber cleaving is the art of cutting glass optical fibers at a perfect 90° angle with a mirror like surface. This isn’t as easy as it sounds. Why do we need to cut the fiber at a perfect 90° angle at all? Well, this is required when we want to fuse two optical fibers together. Optical fiber fusion splicing always requires that the fiber tips have a smooth end face that is perpendicular to the fiber axis. The cleave quality is very important in determining the fusion splicing loss. This is especially true for specialty fibers such as erbium-doped fibers and dispersion-compensating fibers. How do fiber optic cleavers achieve this? The basic idea of optical fiber cleaving is first to scratch the fiber with a very hard diamond edge scribing tool, which induces a sufficiently large surface crack, then the fiber cleaver applies a tensile stress to the fiber which causes the crack to expand rapidly across the fiber cross section. Some other
