Product assurance for undersea communication systems is a must for long term cost savings because the repair cost for such systems is high: in the order of a million dollars for each repair operation. With the advent of optical fiber, a growing technology in the communication field, undersea communication systems are changing from coaxial cable to lightguide cable. In addition to the cable itself, new mechanical components have been developed to interconnect the cables into useful systems. Since the design of these mechanical components is drastically different from their counterparts in a coaxial cable system, detailed investigation into their failure mechanisms is needed for reliability consideration. For a typical system, these mechanical components are: cable terminations, cable-to-cable junctions, repeater housings, and lightguide cable itself. In this paper, the cable termination is used as an example to demonstrate the reliability analysis methology. Failure mechanisms for the other components are given as an overview without any detailed analysis.
Reliability analysis of mechanical components in undersea lightguide communication systems
Analyse der Zuverlässigkeit mechanischer Komponenten von Unterwasser-Lichtleitersystemen
1993
4 Seiten, 5 Bilder, 5 Quellen
Aufsatz (Konferenz)
Englisch