A vacuum-assisted plastic repair splice for joining optical fiber ribbons

A vacuum-assisted, injection-molded, repair splice has been developed for joining linear arrays of optical fibers (fiber ribbons). We describe the assembly tool and procedure followed to fabricate an optical fiber ribbon repair splice. The use of vacuum assist in the connector itself during the assembly process allows one to easily hold the fibers in their grooves and greatly simplifies the assembly tools and procedures required to fabricate a splice. Numerous ribbon splices were made both in the laboratory and in a manhole test facility in an effort to evaluate the quality of the splices obtained using this splicing method. The average splice loss was 0.2 dB with 95 percent of the splice joints having losses less than 0.7 dB.