Fiber Optic Quartz

Yes. FGQuartz produces substrate tubes to customer-specified outer diameter, inner diameter, wall thickness, and length. For customers with standard lathe platforms, FGQuartz maintains dimension references for common configurations. For non-standard lathes — including many custom-built academic and research lathe systems — the customer specifies the required tube geometry and FGQuartz produces accordingly, without imposing a standard size catalogue. Drawings in DXF, STEP, or IGES format are accepted, or the customer can specify geometry directly in millimetres.

Low-OH (dry grade) substrate tubes contain very low concentrations of hydroxyl groups in the fused silica glass network, which minimises the contribution of the tube glass to fiber transmission loss at the water peak wavelength (1383 nm) after the deposition and collapse process. For low-water-peak telecommunications fiber meeting ITU-T G.652.D attenuation requirements, low-OH substrate tubes are mandatory. Standard or high-OH tubes — which offer better deep-UV transmission but higher infrared absorption — are not suitable for telecommunications fiber manufacture but may be used in specialty fiber applications where 1383 nm loss is not a performance criterion, such as UV-transmitting fiber or photocatalysis fiber delivery. FGQuartz supplies both grades and advises on the appropriate choice for each application.

FGQuartz supplies MCVD substrate tubes; VAD reaction tubes and starting rods; OVD mandrels and deposition chamber components; overclad and jacketing tubes; fluorine-doped depressed-cladding tubes; dehydration and chlorine-treatment tubes; sintering furnace muffle tubes and liners; glass lathe chuck inserts and tail-stock fittings; draw tower preform feed chucks and neck zone baffles; PCF capillary tubes and solid cladding rods; PM fiber jacket tubes with SAP hole drilling; and fully custom fused silica components produced to fiber manufacturer drawings for novel fiber designs and process development.

Optical fiber begins as a fused silica preform whose geometry and refractive index profile determine every optical property of the drawn fiber. The substrate tubes, reaction vessels, and deposition components used to build that preform must be made from fused silica because no other practical material combines the required UV-to-infrared transparency, the chemical purity that avoids core contamination, the thermal stability to survive repeated deposition and collapse cycles at high temperature, and the dimensional precision that defines the final fiber geometry. Any impurity or geometric deviation introduced by the preform manufacturing equipment is preserved in every metre of fiber drawn from that preform — the draw process is a high-fidelity copying machine, not a correction mechanism.