Modified Powder-in-Tube Technique Based on the Consolidation Processing of Powder Materials for Fabricating Specialty Optical Fibers

Author： Auguste Jean-Louis Humbert Georges Leparmentier Stéphanie Kudinova Maryna Martin Pierre-Olivier Delaizir Gaëlle Schuster Kay Litzkendorf Doris

Publisher： MDPI

E-ISSN： 1996-1944|7|8|6045-6063

ISSN： 1996-1944

Source： Materials, Vol.7, Iss.8, 2014-08, pp. : 6045-6063

Access to resources Favorite

Disclaimer: Any content in publications that violate the sovereignty, the constitution or regulations of the PRC is not accepted or approved by CNPIEC.

Previous Menu Next

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to demonstrate the interest of a consolidation process associated with the powder-in-tube technique in order to fabricate a long length of specialty optical fibers. This so-called Modified Powder-in-Tube (MPIT) process is very flexible and paves the way to multimaterial optical fiber fabrications with different core and cladding glassy materials. Another feature of this technique lies in the sintering of the preform under reducing or oxidizing atmosphere. The fabrication of such optical fibers implies different constraints that we have to deal with, namely chemical species diffusion or mechanical stress due to the mismatches between thermal expansion coefficients and working temperatures of the fiber materials. This paper focuses on preliminary results obtained with a lanthano-aluminosilicate glass used as the core material for the fabrication of all-glass fibers or specialty Photonic Crystal Fibers (PCFs). To complete the panel of original microstructures now available by the MPIT technique, we also present several optical fibers in which metallic particles or microwires are included into a silica-based matrix.