Hi,

Could you precise what do you mean as cladding? Optical fiber made from fused silica consists of core and cladding and polymer buffer/jacket is placed on the fiber surface. Polymer can be removed by mechanical stripping and this is simple process (as Vincent Lecoeuche answered you). You can use plasma processing too. I do not recomend you fire/flame to do it. Optical fiber becomes very fragile then.

Removing the cladding is completely different process.

Hi,

Core-Cladding-Coating; Most probably you want to remove the coating.

Removing by flame/fire is not a good practice,  it may make the fiber fragile.  

As Vincent and Piotr suggested, a mechanical coating stripper is the best choice

Good Luck !

If you want to remove acrylate material, you can use acetone and it is very easy. If you want to remove Polyamide material a possible option is the burning. Another option is mechanical removal. Neither is easy and requires several attempts until some success is achieved.

yes!

Sometimes (i.e. I have such experience) mild heating eases mechanical stripping. Do not overheat the fiber, it is a bit tricky.

Seems the idea is a naturally thought and straightforward, however, it is not in the right way.

The fire/flame may burn the fiber itself rather than burning the cladding only. The correct and practical method is stripping, either mechanical or chemical. If the coating is too hard to remove, try to put the section of the fiber where you want to remove the coating into the dichloromethane or, less effective, acetone. Be careful of these chemicals since they are toxic. Another good manipulate is using thermal stripper.

https://www.furukawa.co.jp/fitel/english/fusion/fst.htm

Dear Dzetty

I presume that you want to do that because you want to tap into the evanescent wave field for sensing purposes, is that right?

I did that before with a 1 mm diameter glass core/plastic cladding optical fiber and it worked **very** well. The hotter the flame the cleaner the end result looks. For my application this removal technique did not affect adversely the light propagation characteristics of  my fiber.  

However once you remove the buffer and cladding the fiber becomes **very** brittle specially if you are working with smaller diameter core fibers.  For this reason, I stopped using glass core fibers and now I use plastic fibers: they are much more rugged!

Hi ! does anyone know if I can directly buy core only glass fibers ? Meaning no cladding or coating ?

Emma Barbier, you could buy a non-core fiber (NCF), that is the fiber is of a single homogenous glass.