OMC Introduces new High-Performance Laboratory-Grade Polish Finish for its Industrial Fibre Optic Cables

­OMC, a pioneer in optoelectronics design & manufacture, has introduced a new ultra-performance laboratory-grade polish finish for its industrial fibre optic cables and datalinks, designed to serve the most demanding applications. The use of a combination of highly skilled human operators and custom-trained, calibrated and tooled cobots has enabled a new, unprecedented quality of finish to be consistently delivered. While OMC’s existing premium industrial-grade polish finish is perfectly suited to most industrial data communications applications, the new laboratory-grade polish finish can serve even more demanding environments, for instance in research laboratories or big physics applications, where link-to-link consistency is of paramount importance.

Industrial-grade fibre optic cables used in datalinks require high-precision, multi-stage polishing to achieve consistent insertion loss (attenuation) from link to link, ensuring reliability in long-life applications where loose performance tolerances can lead to premature failures, particularly in installations with hundreds or thousands of optical links such as power stations or railway systems. For over 40 years, OMC has developed and deployed the expertise of highly skilled operators in its optoelectronics production facility to consistently achieve the premium industrial-grade polish finish necessary to ensure reliable, long-life datalink performance.

Recently, OMC has introduced collaborative robots (cobots) at its optoelectronics production facility, designed to work safely alongside skilled human operators in a shared workspace. The company has developed its own bespoke programming and tooling for the cobots, as well as new production techniques that leverage the skill of the experienced human operator alongside the resilience and repeatability of the cobot to increase throughput and capacity and reduce operator fatigue, while crucially maintaining quality and ensuring consistency. This combination has also enabled an unprecedented quality of finish – the company’s new laboratory-grade polish finish – to be consistently delivered.

“We knew from experience that robotics alone would be unable to replicate the consistency and throughput achievable by experienced operators,” said William Heath, OMC Managing Director. “However, the addition of the cobot was almost like giving our skilled operators a bionic arm - through considerable iteration, we have managed to achieve a remarkably high-quality finish, meaning that we can now reliably deliver the very highest grade premium performance industrial fibre links with a level of consistency that is otherwise hard for a human operator to sustain.”

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