Polymer Optical fiber (POF) is an Optical Fiber composed of high refractive index polymer material as fiber core and low refractive index polymer material as cladding. Like the quartz optical fiber, the plastic optical fiber also uses the total reflection principle of light. The optical fiber core is a light dense medium and the cladding is a light dense medium. In this way, as long as the angle of light entering is appropriate, the beam of light will be reflected continuously inside the optical fiber and transmitted to the other end.

Advantages of plastic optical fiber

Optical fiber communication has three advantages over traditional electric (copper) cable communication: first, large communication capacity; Second, it has good anti electromagnetic interference and confidentiality performance; Third, it is light in weight and can save a lot of copper. For example, laying a 1000 km long 8-core optical cable can save 1100 tons of copper and 3700 tons of lead than laying an 8-core cable of the same length. Therefore, once the optical fiber and optical cable came out, it was welcomed by the communication industry, which brought a revolution in the communication field and a round of investment and development upsurge. Although quartz (glass) optical fiber has the above-mentioned advantages, it has a fatal weakness: low strength, poor flexural resistance and poor radiation resistance.

Compared with quartz optical fiber, plastic optical fiber is one of the materials for information industry with theoretical research significance and application prospects in the field of Polymer Science in recent 20 years. It has the following characteristics:

( 1) The diameter is large, generally up to 0.5 ~ 1mm. The large fiber core makes its connection simple and easy to align, so that cheap injection molding connectors can be used and the installation cost is very low;

( 2) The numerical aperture (NA) is large, about 0.3 ~ 0.5, and the coupling efficiency with light source and receiving device is high;

( 3) The utility model has the advantages of cheap materials, low manufacturing cost and wide application.