Proceedings of the 10th World Congress on Mechanical, Chemical, and Material Engineering (MCM'24)
Barcelona, Spain - August 22-24, 2024
Paper No. ICMIE 150
DOI: 10.11159/icmie24.150

Failure Time for Optical Fibers Used in Telecommunication Networks
Rochdi El Abdi1, Rodrigo Leité Pinto2
1

Univ Rennes-CNRS, IPR (Institut de Physique de Rennes) - UMR 6251
F-35000 Rennes, France
relabdi@univ-rennes1.fr
2Entreprise Acome
Usines de Mortain, 50140 Mortain, France

Extended Abstract
For optical fibers used in telecommunication networks, the failure prediction of the fibers is needed to plan maintenance
operations and so ensure service reliability. Several methods of calculating the failure probability have already been reported
but most of them don’t take into account the effect of temperature on fiber lifetime.
On the other hand, the position, shape and the propagation of microcracks are different for every piece of fiber, because
they vary with the machine used for manufacturing the fiber, composition of coating materials and the environment aroundthe fiber. This makes difficult to develop a simple mathematical model that can predict fairly accurately the lifetime of fibers
subjected to mechanical, thermal and chemical stresses.
To characterize the mechanical reliability of optical fibers [1, 2], three techniques are used to give stress to the fibers
have been introduced by the standard IEC-60793-1-33, including, axial tension, two-point bending and uniform bending.
Different with axial tension, which mainly describes the fiber condition in cables used for long distances, two-point bending
and uniform bending mainly refer to the fiber stress condition that in access networks or in FTTH (Fiber To The Home).
Along with the development of FTTH, many works focused on the lifetime or mechanical reliability of bend-insensitive
fibers under small radius bending [3-6].
In this work, a lifetime measurement system of uniform twisting technique is introduced. Four mathematical models toestimate the time to failure were studied for different thermomechanical conditions for optical fibers used intelecommunication networks.
Detailed influence factors like temperature, humidity and measurement dispersion are discussed here.

References[1] W. Griffioen, “Evaluation of optical fiber lifetime models based on the power law”. Optical Engineering, Vol. 33, no.
2, pp. 488- 497, 1994.
[2] IEC TR 62048, “Optical fibres -Reliability-Power law theory”. International Electronics Commission, 2014.
[3] H. Shang, L. Hou, G. Chou, R. Hsieh, “Lifetime predictions of bend optimized GGP single mode fiber for FTTH
requirement, in Proceedings of the 57th IWCS, 2008.
[4] D. Mazzarese, P. Weimann, R. Norris, K. Konstadinidis, “Reliability considerations for next-generation bendoptimizedfibers”, in Proceedings of the 57th IWCS, 2008.
[5] W. Griffioen, W. Greven, J. Jonker, S. Zandberg, G. Kuyt, B. Overton, “Reliability of bend insensitive fibers”, inProceedings of the 57th IWCS, 2008.
[6] L. Zhang, J. Li, C. Yan, L. Liu, “ Static n value and lifetime measurement of bend-insensitive optical fibres by uniform
bending method”. International Wire & Cable Symposium, in Proceeding of the 66th IWCS Conference, pp. 189-193
2017.

ICMIE 150-1