Live From Photonics West 2012: Introducing PURAVIS High-Purity Glass Optical Fibers

In this video, Ralf Daferner of SCHOTT introduces PURAVIS high-purity glass optical fibers, which offer outstanding transmission of white light. Due to the lower color shift, illuminated objects retain their natural color, even if the fibers are used in long light guides, making PURAVIS suitable for medical applications such as endoscopy and surgical microscopy.

Video Transcript

Ralf Daferner: Today we are extremely happy about our market launch of the new eco-friendly fibers, PURAVIS. We have developed new class of fibers at Schott in the light of the Schott philosophy of providing eco-friendly products and eco-friendly processes and our new class of optic fibers hit exactly those areas of eco-friendliness and eco-friendly processes.

Not only this, we have achieved very important technical advances in terms of mechanical and chemical stability. And all this comes together in products for medical devices like this kind of endoscope. In such an endoscope, you require a lot of light out of a light source. In order to transmit enough light, the light guide and the glass optic fibers need to have an extraordinary good transmission. This can be achieved with the new fibers. We are 10% points better in transmission compared to our standard fibers.

You also need flexibility. And flexibility is shown in our light guides and it's increased and improved with our new fibers. A medical device needs to be autoclaved. It needs to be cleaned, sterilized. With our new eco-friendly fibers, PURAVIS, we can achieve much longer lifetime of our products so that the doctors do not have to sterilize…no, they have to sterilize exactly the same kind but they can sterilize more often and keeping the same performance.

So overall, we are very happy to introduce this new fiber. And we are launching this product today and we are open to any requests for samples.

Thank you.