STRUCTURE OF OPTICAL FIBER CABLE

摘要

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To assure tensile force and shrinkage force without embedding a tension member into a sheath and to reduce the outside diameter of a cable by coating a laminate of coated optical fiber ribbons and a ribbon-like rod tension member plastic material to unitize the laminate, then housing the unit into a sheath. SOLUTION: The ribbon-like rod (tension member) 13 made of FRP is arranged at a center and the 8-core coated optical fiber ribbons 12 are laminated in the state of holding the rod with three sheets each of the coated fiber ribbons. The laminate is coated with a UV curing resin and is integrated to form the unit 15. The unit is housed into the sheath 14 of a polyethylene tube, by which the optical fiber cable of 48 cores (six sheets of 8-core ribbons) is constituted. Between the inside surface of the sheath and the unit 15 is a gap. Since the coated fiber ribbons 12 are integrated with the ribbon-like rod 13 and is reinforced, microbending hardly occurs. The ribbon-like rod 13 functions also as a resistor to the shrinkage force of the sheath 14.