Jacket for Plastic Optic Cable

My optics sucks.. :(

I have some bare 1mm plastic optic cable.. You know.. Shine light in one end...see light at the other...

I have to put a jacket on the optic cable... I plan on using wire insulation.. It's all I have handy.. I have black wire insulation but no white wire insulation..

Would I get more light transmission if I used white insulation? The cable is 6ft long..

I think no matter what jacket I put on...Any high angle light will bounce so much that it'll be eliminated by the reflective losses.. The dominant light that gets through is all from refraction.

Seems right..but I dunno for sure. D from BC

Reply to
D from BC
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Reply to
ekrubmeg

Well...I guess that settles that.. D from BC

Reply to
D from BC

If it's a proper fiber, the jacket shouldn't make much difference at all - the light is confined by reflecting off the inner surface of the fiber - it never sees the jacket at all; only the losses, and you'll never get them back anyway.

The jacket is for mechanical protection, but if all you want is cosmetic, then you could paint the bare fiber.

Otherwise, either find something to dip it in like Plasti-Dip(tm), or go ahead and thread the fiber through the tube of insulation from a wire, or for that matter, spaghetti tubing, if you want to go through all of that tedium.

Cheers! Rich

Reply to
Rich Grise

If these fibers do not have any jacket at all, they may depend on the low refractive index of surrounding air to produce the total internal reflection that traps the light inside the fiber. In that case, placing any material against the fiber with a higher index of refraction will increase the light leakage out of the fibers, unless it is also highly reflective, like a metal coating.

You can easily test your fibers to see if they depend on being surrounded by air, for their internal reflection, by shining light through a piece, so that you can see or otherwise measure the light output at the other end, and then dip a loop of the fiber into water. If the output drops, dramatically, then you will have to be careful with what you place against the fiber.

Reply to
John Popelish

Damn... I have all sorts of paint here and I didn't think of painting the fiber..What a neat idea :) I think the lead has gotten to me :P D from BC

Reply to
D from BC

Fickn refraction depending on air... :P

Rich mentioned painting the cable. So if I paint the cable..the refraction angle will change..IIRC the refraction angle is reduced. This means the cable gets more selective with increasing ray angles and there's more light loss. Kinda like skipping stones on water..

You mentioned a metal coating... I have aluminized mylar...I could make a reflective tape and wrap that around the fiber.

I'm going to do some thinking :) D from BC

Reply to
D from BC

A good possibility, unless the fiber is already made with two different refrective indexlayers, with the total reflection happening between them. With cheap plastic fibers, this is not necessarily the case.

Yea, something like that.

I was thinking of evaporating metal onto the fiber in a vacuum, but even a good mirror made this way has more loss than the total refraction type reflection. It might look pretty, though. The fbers would look like shiney wire.

Building a little test set up would be helpful. Couple a fiber to an LED at one end and a photo diode or photo transistor at the other end so you can measure the light being carried by the fiber. Then put various stuff against the fiber and see how it reduces the light that gets through. You will find that even bending the fiber more than some minimum radius curve will let light escape at the bend.

Reply to
jpopelish

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