Background
At present, the rapid development of the fiber-to-the-home technology promotes the rapid expansion of the industrial scale of the indoor optical cable. Besides traditional operators, the market of non-operators, such as communication corollary equipment suppliers, military use, sensing products and the like, of indoor optical cable products is rapidly developed.
The demand for products by such customers is primarily for tight-buffered fiber optic cable products. The tight-buffered optical fiber product must be stripped of the tight-buffered coating during use. In order to ensure the quality of the tight-buffered optical fiber and to facilitate the use thereof, the stripping force of the tight-buffered coating layer of the tight-buffered optical fiber must be controlled within a certain range. At present, the tight-buffered coating layer is generally made of materials such as TPEE (thermoplastic polyester elastomer) or PA12 (nylon 12), and due to the characteristics of the materials such as TPEE and PA12, the adhesion to the surface of the optical fiber is strong, the tight-buffered coating layer needs to be stripped with a large force, which causes certain difficulty to reprocessing, and in the stripping process, the optical fiber body is easily damaged, and the product performance is affected.
There are also manufacturers that add a spacer layer between the tight-buffered coating and the fiber body to reduce the stripping force, for example, a 0.25mm diameter fiber, which is coated with a spacer layer to a diameter of 0.4mm, and then coated with a tight-buffered coating to a diameter of 0.9 mm. However, in the scheme, the thickness of the tight-buffered coating layer is sacrificed to obtain smaller stripping strength, and although the stripping strength is reduced in the subsequent stripping process, the tight-buffered coating layer is easy to strip, the abrasion resistance and the tensile strength of the tight-buffered optical fiber are reduced due to the smaller thickness of the tight-buffered coating layer, so that the reliability of the tight-buffered optical fiber is reduced, and the service life of the tight-buffered optical fiber is shortened.
In view of the above, overcoming the drawbacks of the prior art is an urgent problem in the art.
Disclosure of Invention
Aiming at the defects or improvement requirements of the prior art, the invention provides a tight-buffered optical fiber and a manufacturing method of the tight-buffered optical fiber, and aims to arrange a separation layer between an optical fiber body and a tight-buffered layer, wherein the separation layer is made of a special material and serves as a separating agent and a lubricant between the optical fiber body and the tight-buffered layer, so that the tight-buffered layer is easy to separate and slide relative to the optical fiber body, the stripping strength is reduced, the optical fiber body is prevented from being damaged, and the product performance is improved.
To achieve the above object, according to one aspect of the present invention, there is provided a tight-buffered optical fiber including: the optical fiber comprises an optical fiber body 1, a separation layer 2 and a tight sleeve layer 3;
the separation layer 2 is coated on the surface of the optical fiber body 1, and the tight-buffered layer 3 is arranged on the periphery of the separation layer 2;
the separation layer 2 is used for separating the optical fiber body 1 from the tight-buffered layer 3 so as to prevent the tight-buffered layer 3 from being adhered to the optical fiber body 1.
Preferably, the composition of the separation layer 2 includes polybutadiene acrylic copolymer.
Preferably, the thickness of the separation layer 2 is 0.002mm to 0.004 mm.
Preferably, the optical fiber body 1 includes a core 11, a cladding 12, and a coating layer 13;
the cladding 12 is disposed on the periphery of the core 11, the coating layer 13 is disposed on the periphery of the cladding 12, and the release layer 2 is coated on the surface of the coating layer 13.
Preferably, the composition of the tight-buffered layer 3 comprises a thermoplastic polyester elastomer and/or nylon.
Preferably, the diameter of the tight-buffered optical fiber is 0.85 mm-0.95 mm.
Preferably, the stripping force for stripping a tight-buffered optical fiber of 15mm + -2 mm is in the range of 3.8N to 4.2N.
According to another aspect of the present invention, there is provided a method of manufacturing a tight-buffered optical fiber, the method comprising:
coating a separation layer on the surface of the optical fiber body by using a coating device, wherein the coating device contains a preset separation agent;
the periphery of separation layer is makeed tight jacket layer, wherein, through the separation layer interval the optical fiber body with tight jacket layer to avoid tight jacket layer with mutual adhesion between the optical fiber body.
Preferably, the coating device is used for coating a separation layer on the surface of the optical fiber body, wherein the coating device contains a preset separation agent, and the preset separation agent comprises:
controlling the coating device to work in a preset pressure range, so that a preset separating agent is uniformly coated on the surface of the optical fiber body;
and controlling the curing oven to work in a preset temperature range, and curing the separating agent coated on the surface of the optical fiber body to form a separating layer, wherein the separating layer comprises a polybutadiene acrylic acid copolymer.
Preferably, the preset pressure range is 0.04MPa to 0.05MPa, and the preset temperature range is 200 ℃ to 400 ℃.
Generally, compared with the prior art, the technical scheme of the invention has the following beneficial effects: the tight-buffered optical fiber comprises the separation layer, the separation layer is arranged between the optical fiber body and the tight-buffered layer, the separation layer is made of special materials, and the separation layer serves as a separating agent and a lubricating agent between the optical fiber body and the tight-buffered layer, so that the tight-buffered layer is easy to separate and slide relative to the optical fiber body, the stripping strength is reduced, the optical fiber body is prevented from being damaged, the product performance is improved, and the technical problem that the tight-buffered layer is difficult to strip can be effectively solved.
Furthermore, the thickness of the separation layer is small, the thickness of the tight-buffered layer cannot be influenced, the abrasion resistance and the tensile property of the tight-buffered optical fiber can be ensured, the reliability of the tight-buffered optical fiber is improved, and the service life of the tight-buffered optical fiber is prolonged.
Detailed Description
In order to make the objects, technical solutions and advantages of the present invention more apparent, the present invention is described in further detail below with reference to the accompanying drawings and embodiments. It should be understood that the specific embodiments described herein are merely illustrative of the invention and are not intended to limit the invention.
In the description of the present invention, the terms "inner", "outer", "longitudinal", "lateral", "upper", "lower", "top", "bottom", and the like indicate orientations or positional relationships based on those shown in the drawings, and are for convenience only to describe the present invention without requiring the present invention to be necessarily constructed and operated in a specific orientation, and thus should not be construed as limiting the present invention.
In addition, the technical features involved in the embodiments of the present invention described below may be combined with each other as long as they do not conflict with each other.
Example 1:
at present, the tight-buffered layer is generally made of materials such as TPEE (thermoplastic polyester elastomer) or PA12 (nylon 12), and due to the characteristics of the materials such as TPEE and PA12, the adhesion to the surface of the optical fiber is strong, the tight-buffered layer needs to be stripped with a large force, which causes certain difficulty to reprocessing, and in the stripping process, the optical fiber body is easily damaged, which affects the product performance.
To solve the foregoing problems, the present embodiment provides a tight-buffered optical fiber, and one of the realizations of the tight-buffered optical fiber of the present embodiment is described in detail below with reference to fig. 1 and 2. In fig. 1, the tight-buffered optical fiber is partially stripped to show the positional relationship between the different layers.
The tight buffered optical fiber of this embodiment includes: the optical fiber comprises an optical fiber body 1, a separation layer 2 and a tight-buffered layer 3, wherein the separation layer 2 is coated on the surface of the optical fiber body 1, and the tight-buffered layer 3 is arranged on the periphery of the separation layer 2. The composition of the tight-buffered layer 3 includes thermoplastic polyester elastomer and/or nylon, or other materials, which are not limited herein. In an actual application scenario, the separation layer 2 is used for separating the optical fiber body 1 from the tight-buffered layer 3, so as to prevent the tight-buffered layer 3 from being adhered to the optical fiber body 1.
Specifically, the optical fiber body 1 includes a core 11, a cladding 12, and a coating layer 13, the cladding 12 is disposed on the periphery of the core 11, the coating layer 13 is disposed on the periphery of the cladding 12, and the parting layer 2 is coated on the surface of the coating layer 13.
In the actual stripping process, because the tight-buffered optical fiber comprises the separation layer 2, the separation layer 2 is made of special materials, and the separation layer 2 serves as a separating agent and a lubricating agent between the optical fiber body 1 and the tight-buffered layer 3, so that the tight-buffered layer 3 is easy to separate and slide relative to the optical fiber body 1, the stripping force is reduced, and the technical problem that the tight-buffered layer 3 is difficult to strip can be effectively solved.
There are also manufacturers that add a spacer layer between the tight-buffered layer 3 and the optical fiber body 1 to reduce the stripping strength, for example, the diameter of the optical fiber is 0.25mm, the spacer layer is coated to 0.4mm, and then the tight-buffered layer 3 is coated to 0.9mm (the thickness of the tight-buffered layer 3 is only about 0.25 mm). However, in this scheme, the thickness of the tight-buffered layer 3 is sacrificed to obtain a smaller stripping strength, and although the stripping strength is reduced in the subsequent stripping process, the tight-buffered layer 3 is easy to strip, the abrasion resistance and the tensile strength of the tight-buffered optical fiber are reduced due to the smaller thickness of the tight-buffered layer 3, so that the reliability of the tight-buffered optical fiber is reduced, and the service life of the tight-buffered optical fiber is shortened.
Through a great deal of research and experiments, the inventor finds that when the separation layer 2 is made of polybutadiene acrylic acid copolymer, the effect of reducing the peeling strength can be achieved by only making the separation layer 2 thinner. Therefore, under the condition that the diameter of a product is certain, although the separation layer 2 is added, the thickness of the subsequent tight-buffered layer 3 cannot be influenced, the stripping strength can be reduced, the abrasion resistance and the tensile property of the tight-buffered optical fiber can be ensured, the reliability of the tight-buffered optical fiber is improved, and the service life of the tight-buffered optical fiber is prolonged.
In practical application, the composition of the separating layer 2 comprises polybutadiene acrylic copolymer, as shown in fig. 2, the thickness d1 of the separating layer 2 is 0.002 mm-0.004 mm, and the thickness is small. For the optical fiber body 1 having a diameter (2r) of 0.25mm, the optical fiber diameter after coating the release layer 2 was 0.254mm to 0.258 mm. In a practical application scenario, the thickness of the tight-buffered optical fiber is generally 0.85mm to 0.95mm, and it can be seen that even if the separation layer 2 is added, the thickness d2 of the tight-buffered layer 3 can also reach a thicker thickness, for example, when the thickness of the tight-buffered optical fiber is 0.9mm, the thickness d2 of the tight-buffered layer 3 is 0.321mm to 0.323mm, and the thickness is increased by 28.4% to 29.2% compared with the aforementioned (0.25mm) tight-buffered layer 3, so that the abrasion resistance and tensile strength of the tight-buffered optical fiber can be effectively ensured, the reliability of the tight-buffered optical fiber is improved, and the service life of the tight-buffered optical fiber is prolonged.
The magnitude of the stripping force of the tight-buffered optical fiber of this example is described below based on test data.
As shown in fig. 3, the same test conditions are adopted to perform the peeling strength test process and the test result for the tight-buffered optical fiber and the ordinary tight-buffered optical fiber of this embodiment:
firstly, a tight-buffered optical fiber with the outer diameter of (0.80-0.90) mm +/-0.05 mm is selected as a test sample, the test sample is divided into two groups, the first group is a common tight-buffered optical fiber, the second group is the tight-buffered optical fiber provided by the invention, each group comprises 10 test samples, the stripping length is 15mm +/-2 mm, and the stripping rate is 10 mm/min. The peel force test was then carried out according to the requirements in GB/T15972.32, with 5 peel tests being carried out for each of the 10 test specimens.
The test results are: the stripping force of the second group of tight-buffered optical fibers is 3.8N-4.2N, and the stripping force of the first group of tight-buffered optical fibers is 20N-25N.
Therefore, the stripping force of the tight-buffered optical fiber is far smaller than that of the common tight-buffered optical fiber, so that the difficulty of stripping the tight-buffered layer 3 can be reduced, and the stripping efficiency of the tight-buffered layer 3 can be improved; meanwhile, in the stripping process, the stripping force is small, the optical fiber body 1 can be effectively prevented from being damaged, and the product performance is improved.
Different from the prior art, the tight-buffered optical fiber comprises the separation layer 2, the separation layer 2 is arranged between the optical fiber body 1 and the tight-buffered layer 3, the separation layer 2 is made of special materials, and the separation layer 2 serves as a separating agent and a lubricating agent between the optical fiber body 1 and the tight-buffered layer 3, so that the tight-buffered layer 3 is easy to separate and slide relative to the optical fiber body 1, and the technical problem that the tight-buffered layer 3 is difficult to peel off can be effectively solved.
Furthermore, the thickness of the separation layer 2 is small, the thickness of the tight-buffered layer 3 cannot be influenced, the abrasion resistance and the tensile property of the tight-buffered optical fiber can be ensured, the reliability of the tight-buffered optical fiber is improved, and the service life of the tight-buffered optical fiber is prolonged.
Example 2:
the present invention also provides a method for manufacturing a tight-buffered optical fiber, which is applicable to the tight-buffered optical fiber of embodiment 1.
One of the realizations of the method for manufacturing the tight-buffered optical fiber according to the present embodiment will be described in detail below with reference to fig. 4 and 5. The manufacturing method of the tight-buffered optical fiber comprises the following steps:
step 401: and coating a separation layer on the surface of the optical fiber body by using a coating device, wherein the coating device contains a preset separation agent.
The optical fiber body comprises a fiber core, a cladding and a coating layer, the cladding is arranged on the periphery of the fiber core, the coating layer is arranged on the periphery of the cladding, and the separation layer is coated on the surface of the coating layer. The optical fiber body can be prefabricated or purchased through other channels in advance.
In the present embodiment, the optical fiber body is passed through the coating device 41 by the paying-off system 40, wherein the paying-off pressure of the paying-off system 40 is about 1N, so that the surface of the optical fiber body is coated with the release layer by the coating device 41, wherein the coating device 41 contains a preset release agent. Wherein the preset separating agent comprises polybutadiene acrylic acid copolymer.
In a specific application scenario, through holes are formed in two sides of the coating device 41, and a connection line between the two through holes is parallel to a supporting platform corresponding to the coating device 41, so that the optical fiber body can better pass through the through holes in the two sides of the coating device 41. In addition, in order to avoid the overflow of the preset separating agent from the through hole, the aperture of the through hole is matched with the aperture of the optical fiber body, for example, the aperture of the through hole is only slightly larger than the aperture of the optical fiber body.
Step 402: the periphery of separation layer is makeed tight jacket layer, wherein, through the separation layer interval the optical fiber body with tight jacket layer to avoid tight jacket layer with mutual adhesion between the optical fiber body.
In this embodiment, after the separation layer is manufactured, an tight-buffered layer is manufactured on the periphery of the separation layer, wherein the composition of the tight-buffered layer includes thermoplastic polyester elastomer and/or nylon, or other materials, which are not limited herein.
The tight-buffered optical fiber manufactured by the manufacturing method comprises the separation layer which is arranged between the optical fiber body and the tight-buffered layer, the separation layer is made of special materials, and the separation layer serves as a separating agent and a lubricating agent between the optical fiber body and the tight-buffered layer, so that the tight-buffered layer is easy to separate and slide relative to the optical fiber body, the stripping force can be reduced, and the technical problem that the tight-buffered layer is difficult to strip can be effectively solved.
Further, in order to ensure the uniformity of the coating of the release layer, step 401 specifically includes controlling the coating device 41 to operate in a preset pressure range, so that the preset release agent is uniformly coated on the surface of the optical fiber body. Wherein the preset pressure range is 0.04MPa to 0.05MPa, for example, the pressure can be controlled to be 0.04 MPa.
Specifically, the pressure inside the coating device 41 can be controlled by a pressure control valve on the coating device 41, thereby controlling the coating effect of the surface of the optical fiber body. The pressure level is generally determined by the actual conditions, for example, by the concentration of the separating agent and the thickness of the separating layer. In addition, in an actual application scenario, the pressure inside the coating device 41 can be adaptively adjusted according to the production rate, and it is sufficient to ensure that the separation layer can be uniformly coated on the surface of the optical fiber body.
The optical fiber body coated with the release agent still has moisture remaining thereon, and in this embodiment, the release agent is further heated and cured by the curing oven 42 to form a release layer. Specifically, the curing oven 42 is controlled to operate within a preset temperature range, and the release agent coated on the surface of the optical fiber body is cured to form a release layer, wherein the cooling process of the optical fiber body coated with the release layer after heating and curing is pure air cooling. The preset temperature range is 200 ℃ to 400 ℃, the specific curing temperature is determined according to the actual situation, for example, the curing temperature is 200 ℃, 220 ℃, 230 ℃ or 300 ℃, the specific temperature is not limited, and is set according to the actual situation. In practical application scenarios, the curing temperature of the curing oven 42 can be adaptively adjusted according to the production rate, so as to ensure that the separating agent can be well cured.
After the separation layer is manufactured, the optical fiber passes through the negative pressure pumping device 43, and the pressure of the negative pressure pumping device 43 can be controlled to be 0.04 MPa. Then, a tight-buffered layer of the tight-buffered optical fiber is produced, specifically, the optical fiber is passed through a tight-buffered material extruder 44, wherein the tight-buffered material extruder 44 contains a tight-buffered material such as a thermoplastic polyester elastomer and/or nylon. The tight-buffered material is extruded by the tight-buffered material extruder 44 to produce a tight-buffered layer on the periphery of the separation layer, wherein the extrusion temperature is 200 ℃, 220 ℃ or 230 ℃ depending on the actual situation, so as to ensure that the tight-buffered layer can be produced well.
The tight-buffered optical fiber is formed by cooling the tight-buffered layer of the optical fiber body coated with the tight-buffered material through a cooling water tank 45. Under the specific application scene, can be provided with detection device in the cooling trough 45, detect tight-buffered fiber diameter and the outward appearance of tight-buffered fiber through detection device, select the tight-buffered fiber that diameter and outward appearance all accord with the requirement. Then, the tight-buffered optical fiber is guided into a take-up system 47 by a traction mechanism 46, and the manufacture of the tight-buffered optical fiber is completed.
It should be noted that, in the whole manufacturing process, the path that the tight-buffered optical fiber passes should be kept highly consistent, so as to prevent the coating of the optical fiber that is not completely cooled from being scraped, thereby ensuring the surface quality of the coating.
Under the specific reference scene, the production speed is 60m/min, the diameter of the optical fiber coated with the separation layer is controlled to be 0.254 mm-0.258 mm, the outer diameter of the tight-buffered optical fiber is controlled to be 0.85 mm-0.95 mm, and the good take-up quality is ensured.
In this embodiment, the thickness of the separation layer is 0.002mm to 0.004mm, and the thickness of the tight-buffered layer is not affected by the small thickness, so that the abrasion resistance and tensile strength of the tight-buffered optical fiber can be ensured, the reliability of the tight-buffered optical fiber is improved, and the service life of the tight-buffered optical fiber is prolonged.
Different from the prior art, the tight-buffered optical fiber manufactured by the manufacturing method comprises the separation layer, the separation layer is arranged between the optical fiber body and the tight-buffered layer, the separation layer is made of special materials, and the separation layer serves as a separating agent and a lubricating agent between the optical fiber body and the tight-buffered layer, so that the tight-buffered layer is easy to separate and slide relative to the optical fiber body, the stripping strength is reduced, the optical fiber body is prevented from being damaged, the product performance is improved, and the technical problem that the tight-buffered layer is difficult to strip can be effectively solved.
It will be understood by those skilled in the art that the foregoing is only a preferred embodiment of the present invention, and is not intended to limit the invention, and that any modification, equivalent replacement, or improvement made within the spirit and principle of the present invention should be included in the scope of the present invention.