Optical fiber

You must have heard about optical fiber and most of you always want to know about what it is and how it works. So this blog will help you.

What is optical fiber?
Fiber optics is transparent fiber made by glass (silica) or plastic. Fiber optics is made up of very thin strands of glass also called optical fiber. It is more advance than copper wire as it has very less signal loss compare to copper wire. Fibers are wrapped in bundles so that ti can be used to carry images. Optical fiber is very complex in manufacturing while joining electrical wire or cable. It needs very careful cleaving of fibers, precise alignment of fibers core and coupling of these aligned core.

How it works?

Fiber optics transmit data in form of light particles (photons) that pulse through the fiber optical cable. It is a light based technology. Optical fiber consist two main parts which includes core in which light travels and the another layer of glass is called cladding.The cladding job is to keep light inside the core. When light signals are sent through fiber optic cable, they reflect off the core and cladding in a series of zig-zig bounces and this process is called total internal reflection. Sometime these signals need to renew when the path is long. Therefore Repeaters  at certain distant intervals are used to regenerate the optical signal by converting it to electrical signal. Electrical signal is then processed to re transmit the optical signal.

Communication:

Fiber optics communication is used to transmit information from one end to other end.  One cable can have hundreds strands. This strand is very thin almost tenth of human hair and can handle almost 25,000 telephone calls. So an entire cable can handle millions calls. Military and Space industries also use optical fiber as means of communication.

Power transition:
Optical fiber can be used to transmit power using Photovoltaic  cell to convert light into electricity. While this method of power transition is not efficient as the regular methods.