Fabrication and Characterization of Splitter 3×3 based on Polimer Optical Fibre (POF) with Low Cost Fusion Technique

Polymer optical fiber (POF) has many advantages making it the choice of today’s communication, especially in automotive industry. This communication requires low cost ways for much information to be sent simultaneously. Because of this, using wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) concept, a low cost and green 3×3 POF splitter is fabricated. It is fabricated using cheap and easy-to-find tools such as metal tube and candle. The fabrication is being done by taking three strands of POF and heating the middle parts so that it will melted and fused together until it elongated and shrink to a diameter of 1 mm. Successfully fabricated POF splitter are characterized by measuring the output losses, before and after the POF’s end is being smoothed and polished using two sand papers of different degree of coarseness. This is to observe the effect of polishing on optical signal losses. POF splitter’s losses are also measured on different temperature to observe the effect of temperature on the splitter’s performance. Based on the result, it is obvious that cleanliness and a flat POF’s end surface influenced the losses with a reduction between 0.3 and 5.0 dB. Temperature, even though subtle, does also affect the signal losses with increased losses averaging around 0.3 dB. Overall, the losses in the fabricated POF splitter are still high, but show promising improvement with amelioration of fusion technique and the use of tools with higher quality. This low cost fabrication technique is believed to commercially produce cheap POF splitter, but with more in-depth research on the fusion technique, the source of losses and ways to minimize the losses can be obtained and improve the output optic signals.