What's the Best Way to Clean Plastic Clad Silica Fiber?

When cleaning soft plastic clad silica fiber, the Sticklers™ team recommends using the Sticklers™ fiber optic cleaning fluid. This chemistry is used every day to clean PCS fiber in various applications. For example, an aerospace manufacturer uses the Sticklers™ cleaning fluid on their PCS fiber. It works very well and does not cause any deformation or clouding of the fibers.

The other product would be the Sticklers™ Benchtop 90 wipes or the CleanWipes™ 640. The wipes plus the cleaning fluid would enable field techs to clean the PCS fiber before splicing. The products are simple and inexpensive, and easy to ship world-wide.

PCS fiber can be tricky to work with. It’s often found in very short haul applications or in environments where weight is a factor. The main applications of plastic-clad silica fiber are audio/visual (like the connectors on the back of most modern high-def TVs), industrial, medical or sensing applications. Most PCS fiber uses cores that are larger than standard data communications fibers for simplicity of installation and resistance to contamination. A wider core means PCS fibers have significantly lower performance characteristics — higher transmission losses and lower bandwidths — than traditional all-glass fibers.

If a client wants to send to the Sticklers™ lab some test parts, the Sticklers™ lab has the ability to test and to document the cleaning effectiveness on your particular parts and their configuration. The lab then returns a detailed cleaning procedure in a written report. The report would include step-by-step process along with lots of images with the scope of creating a document that will help their operators or customers.