AVIT System for Automated Inspection and Cleaning of Fiber Optic Connectors

The DON, specifically on military aircraft, and other components of DOD with land, sea and air systems and other US government agencies continue to expand their use of fiber-optic based systems creating a need to maintain mission critical components quickly and accurately. Over 85% of fiber optic network failures occur due to contamination. Defense contractors and program offices reported about 60-80% of failed fiber-optic enabled systems were erroneously returned to the manufacturer due to contamination. Currently, technicians use manual inspect and clean methods. Numerous problems arise; manual approaches are time consuming and tedious; technicians must subjectively assess if end-faces are compliant with established standards, risk of potential damage to installed components, and of recontamination due to the length of time the connection remains open. Therefore, FiberQA has developed the AVITÖ systems for circular connectors (AVIT-RH) and for backplane OpenVPX MT ferrules (AVIT-BP) that are remote head systems for automated fiber-optic inspection and cleaning of the fiber endfaces. These and other types of AVIT systems are currently used in several DOD mil-aero and DoE applications, such as F-35 production, USAF drone manufacturing and sustainment and P-8A depot level support. Working with our existing customers, we identified several improvements to the AVIT-RHĀĀfor circular connectors and a new requirement to inspect rectangular connectors on WRAs (and associated cables) to meet the needs of aircraft sustainment during deployed operation. Sustainment represents a market size up to $250M (over five years) across several DON and other DOD military programs. The life-cycle customer savings are significant yielding rapid return on investment; 5-15x faster inspection, reduced number of personnel, reduced risk of damage, reduced recontamination, increased reliability and quality due to objective Pass/Fail, and documented results with images for upper management review. In this topic, DON has identified specific needs that demand both a new style of the AVIT platform (which will become a new model of AVIT-BP or AVIT-RHR) and improvements to the existing AVIT-RH system. We believe that our underlying, patented technology, including a common software for image acquisition, fiber end face Pass/Fail processing and cleaner operation can be adapted to meet these needs. This proposal seeks SBIR Phase I funding for the development efforts to verify this assertion.