Fiber Splicing Process Research for High-Precision Optical Path Assembly of IFOG

A series of assembly processes are developed to improve the optical path performance of a kind of interferometric fiber optic gyroscope (IFOG). The assembly process of IFOG optical path mainly points to the fiber splicing operation of different fibers. First, a thermal exfoliation process is developed to decrease the surface exfoliation defect of fiber. Second, a loss-damage cutting method is proposed to control the end-face verticality degree of fiber. Third, several arc discharge functions of fiber splicer are designed to carry out the high-quality splicing. Three kinds of fibers, i.e., the single-mode fiber, the polarization maintaining fiber, and the erbium-doped fiber, are utilized. The arc discharge functions of different fiber combination modes are designed. Finally, when evaluating the process improvement effect of optical path assembly, the splicing loss of total IFOG optical path, the Weibull distribution-based reliability index, and some integrated evaluation indexes of IFOG, are considered to estimate the assembly quality. Many experiment results have proved the correctness and the effectiveness of proposed techniques.