My mentor is away at a conference, so she left prep work for me to complete. This includes cutting, stripping, and polishing both ends of a 1 mm thick, 15 cm long optical fiber, with a goal of 8 working fibers. Do you know how fragile a 1 mm fiber of glass is? This blog could also be titled,”Science brought to you by the number 8″. Polishing a fiber consists of mounting it to a polishing disk and using a series of 5 nanoscale sandpapers in order. You must make 80 figure 8’s on each sandpaper. And yes, it is possible to suddenly forget how to draw an 8! I was able to complete 10 fibers in 2 days.
That’s a lot of prep work…. but it’s all worth it. Gives me a student challenge/game idea. Which team can create the best system for efficiently producing ….. ???? Just a thought