Design and fabrication of an acrylic-based 1×2 POF coupler using CNC Machining

A low cost acrylic-based 1times2 Plastic optical fiber (POF) coupler has been designed and fabricated. The POF coupler has a middle waveguide taper made of UV curable glue and POF fibers for the input and output ports. Non-sequential ray tracing has been performed on the POF coupler. Mold insert has been fabricated using EGX-400 desktop CNC machining with a groove opening of 1 mm which allows the 1 mm core size POF to be slotted into the mold insert. Norland NOA-71 UV curable glue is injected into the waveguide taper region and cured using UV exposure source. The device has an insertion loss of 8 dB and excess loss of about 4.6 dB.