Plastic Optical Fiber
Does anyone know the advantage and disadvantages for plastic optical fiber ?
Regards
Linspire
As a slogan-like answer, cheap and low performance. Seriously spoken, I would ask for the field of application.
Can give more specific answer ?
I have found these from google search:
Advantages:
-High reflective index difference is maintained between core and cladding
-high numerical aperture
-high mechanical flexibility and low cost
Disadvantages:
-Low bandwidth which limits data rate
-higher cost and limited temperature performance
Plastic fiber is low-cost and good for demonstrations and simple projects not requiring a low loss. Real optical fibers are expensive, require a careful professional handling, but offer an extremely low loss and long-time high-quality performance.
For audio-signal transmission without interference, short plastic-fiber cables with connectors are available. This is one good application of plastic cables.
Hey guys,
How about this question ?
State one advantage and one disadvantage of a plastic fibre as compared to a single mode glass fibre for use in an optical communication system.
unless its going to be used over a very short distance say only a few metres, rather than kilometres I cant think of any good reason why you would want to use plastic.
The purity of glass fibre has a far higher ability for the transmission of light. that is ... much lower attenuation.
If there were good reasons they would be using plastic instead of glass. And back in the days when I use to do optical fibre jointing for a large telecoms company
the joining methods used for glass produce a very efficient transmission joint.
Dave
The problem is that the question isn't referring to a particular application. Apparently it's a text book exercise or homework question. But your answers from post #3 are basically in the right direction.