After cleaning the fibre again, we are ready to perform the actual splicing of the fibres. The splicing process As stated above, fusion splicing uses an electrical arc to heat the fibre ends and weld them together. Each fibre first is inserted into the fusion splicer and pre-fused at a low energy level. Pre-fusing warms the fibre and removes any moisture or particulate matter from the end of the fibre. Finally, using a higher energy level, the fusion of the two fibres is made to complete the splice.
Fusion splicing is the most reliable and offers the greatest integrity of any type of splice.
In fact, if you try to break a fusion splice, it is more likely that the fibre itself will break before splice does. It also offers the lowest loss of various splices. The major drawback of this splicing method is that a fusion splicer is very expensive and not cost-effective to purchase if you only have a few splices to do. A mechanical splice uses a solid plastic or metallic body to couple the fibres together. The coupling itself is spring-loaded to maintain as small a distance as possible between the two fibres to minimise the splice loss.