Low-Cost Fiber-Optic Connector Cleaner

The development effort for the Phase I program will entail a multi-step approach to developing a concept(s) for a low-cost fiber connector cleaning process and prove its feasibility. The approach will consist of six main steps, namely; concept development, concept distillation/ selection, prototyping, test methodology development, experimentation, and evaluation for productization. The beginning steps in this effort will be to generate as many concepts as possible without alliance to any and then objectively select the best concept or concepts that can be prototyped to establish feasibility. In addition to this conceptual development effort, a systematic and objective test methodology will be established to quantitatively grade or determine the effectively of the cleaning process. This technique will be used to gather data during the cleaning experiments and will establish a common, unbiased means for evaluating cleaning effectively. All of the test data will be evaluated and estimates will be made as to the cleaning cost, apparatus size, and apparatus costs to bring the optimal cleaner to a productized state.