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What is the efficiency of end glow fiber optic cables?

Both single strand end glow fiber optic filament and fiber optic cable will transmit light. The primary difference is that a fiber optic cable is a number of fiber optic filaments covered in a protective jacket.

The efficiency of end glow fiber optic cables effected by many factors, too numerous to go into in detail here. However, here are a few of the most important.

1. Fill factor

At the illumination end where the fibers are stacked together together about 30% of the area onto which you are focusing your input light is dead space.

2. Illumination overfill factor

At the illumination end you need to overfill the fibers with the focused light to ensure that they all are illuminated. This will depend on your condenser geometry. As a guess I would say that at this point you will lose about 50% of the light.

3. Collection angle

The fibers will accept light with a cone semi angle of 30 degrees. Light sources generally emit into an angle 4 pi steradians. You can do the calculation to determine the amount of light actually transmitted through the fiber.