About the Silica fibre facility
We specialise in the manufacture and research of doped and structured fibres. Our equipment includes fibre towers and modified chemical vapor deposition (MCVD) lathes. We also house a range of preform and fibre characterisation tools.
We produce industry-standard passive and active preforms and fibres. We also manufacture specialist fibres with complex structures, for example hollow core fibres. This enables research into high-power fibre lasers and advanced telecommunications and sensing devices.
Complete post-processing and characterisation of silica fibre includes:
- preform and fibre index profilers
- fibre proof-testing
- high-resolution optical time domain reflectometry (OTDR)
Highlights
- we produce a range of fibre types including ribbon, spun, bundle and microstructured. We also produce fibres with dimensions in the 50 to 1500 micrometre (μm) range
- features of our drawing tower include both conventional thermal and ultra-violet (UV) cured polymers, as well as novel high temperature UV cured polymers and novel dynamic preform spinning
- we use well-established outside vapor deposition (OVD) technology to explore high-volume fabrication of rare-earth doped glasses
- we use MCVD in-situ solution doping and vapour phase techniques. This allows us to create next generation rare-earth doped fibres for high power lasers
- low loss hollow core fibre fabrication. Against conventional technology, we see lower losses at telecommunications wavelengths. We achieve similar in the UV, visible and mid-infrared
- 10 kilometre continuous draw of low-loss, uniform lengths of hollow core fibre
