The Development Of Mechanical Properties Automatic Test System For Electric Power Optical Fiber Cable

Electric power optical fiber cable is a kind of special optical fiber cable used in electric power industry. It is rapidly developed with the development of electric power communication in recent years. At present, both ADSS (All Dielectric Self-Support) optical fiber cable and OPGW (Optical Fiber Composite Ground Wire) are widely used as electric power optical fiber cable in our country. For both ADSS and OPGW are fixed on electric power poles, so these optical fiber cables should satisfy the requirement of long span and anti electric eroding. As a result, mechanical properties tests on these optical fiber cables become very important. If the mechanical properties tests were carried out manually, abundant manpower and time will be used. So, developing a set of automatic system to test the mechanical properties of electric power optical fiber cable is an exigent problem. The type of GLS-5 optical fiber cable mechanical properties automatic test system is specially designed to meet the requirement of above problem. This system is special equipment for testing the mechanical properties (Including tensile, crushing, impacting, bending, torsion, flexing, winding, wriggling, stress & strain, rupturing) of electric power optical fiber cable to examine the abilities to resist outside force put on cables during installing and running. The test results are used to determine whether the mechanical properties can satisfy specific criterion.In this article, the development of this system is introduced. And this system ismade up of test equipments, test meters and a control computer. This system can test the dispersion at wavelengths of 1310nm and 1550nm, and can carry out many tests on optical fiber cables, such as tensile test, stress & strain test, crushing test, impacting test, bending test, torsion test, flexing test, winding test, sheath abrasion test, flag abrasion test, rupturing test and wriggling test.Firstly, optical fiber cables mechanical properties tests are introduced in this paper. The functions and the technical parameters of the system are explained either. At the same time, the test principles and test methods used in the paper are introduced in detail. They include test principles and test methods of optical fiber attenuation, optical fiber strain, optical fiber dispersion and optical fiber cable strain.Secondly, the design idea and design method of the system are introduced. They include the structure of the system, connecting mode of the system, control mode of the test equipments and the structure of the test software. Both method and content of hardware design and software design in the system are specially introduced. Hardware design includes structure design and function design of all test equipments. Electric principle drawings are listed in paper. Software design includes both PLC program design and control computer program design. In this paper, the software design method of control equipments is exemplified by PLC program used on flexing test equipment. As far as computer program is concerned, the structure, the flow chart, the original code of some functional subprogram and sub-function is depicted in detail.Finally, both test result and the appearance of the system are listed in the paper. Some special problems to be regarded during system designing and system testing are listed. And some special tricks and methods used in this system are listed either.