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Holiday Update:
Fiber Optic Center will be closed December 24 and 25. Due to potential early carrier pickups, PLEASE HAVE ALL ORDERS IN BY NOON ON MONDAY, DECEMBER 23.
We will resume our regular business hours on Thursday, December 26.
Fiber Optic Center will be at Photonics West - Schedule your meeting with a member of the FOC team now
Kelly Barker, Business Development, Epoxies, Technical Sales
Kelly started her career in customer service, marketing and sales. Since then, she has been promoted to management positions in these departments, project management director, and new business development with a specialty in product line marketing strategy.
Kelly joined Fiber Optic Center, Inc. from PennWell Corporation where she spent more than five years in business development within various industries including Fiber Optics, Cabling, Connector, LED, Military and Aerospace. She has worked extensively with adhesive manufacturers on their product lines and applications within these markets.
Kelly graduated Magna Cum Laude from the University of Massachusetts at Lowell in 1997 with a BS degree in Marketing and Management and a minor in Legal Studies. She resides in Nashua, NH with her husband and two girls, Maizie and Audrey. She enjoys being involved in community activities, such as park and recreation sports with her girls, and enjoys camping and reading.
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Perhaps one of the most maddening things about a mixed material is entrained bubbles. Depending on how you mix, you may entrain none, or a ton of them. You want to stab them, push them and blow on them. Anything to break them. But in many...
Epoxy is a permanent adhesive. When properly chosen for your application and substrates, and properly cured, it will form a strong, permanent bond. At times though, you may find that you need to recover bonded parts or clean parts to remove excess cured...
When working with epoxies and adhesives, there are several consistent areas that beg for clarity. FOC knows because we generally field those questions and concerns. Among the top of that list are: Room temperature storage best practices, Storage methods...
From time to time, FOC has been asked to recommend a pigment that can be safely added to UV curable coatings as well as offer advice about what ratio of pigment to coating is acceptable without compromising the integrity of the coating.
As communicated by our...
Fabricating fiber optic cable assemblies is still in large part a manual process, requiring knowledge and skill. When something in the process goes awry, an investigation is needed to identify and address the cause. Recently, our team of experts met to discuss...
"How do I know what curing schedule I should use?” This is a common question that fiber optic cable assembly houses ask – and it’s a particularly good question. Why? When our customers ask this question, it tells us they are focusing on a critical aspect of...
When fiber optic cable assembly manufacturers ask us to help troubleshoot their epoxy curing issues, we find that some problems stem from improper mixing of epoxy. Other problems arise from lax cleaning procedures or improper dispensing of epoxy...
Too often, the process of bonding optical fiber to a ferrule – the epoxy step – is treated as an afterthought in fiber optic cable assembly houses. However, this is an extremely critical step in the assembly process, since it is a major factor in determining...
The glass transition, Tg, is the temperature at which cured epoxies go from being rigid and glassy to being rubbery and more flexible. Most of us think of cured epoxies as being pretty hard (Shore D) materials; and they are, due to the crosslinked nature of their...
In the fiber optic cable assembly process, working with epoxy generates a lot of questions. When I visit fabrication facilities, we discuss the finer points of mixing the material, loading syringes, minimizing waste, heat-treating crystallized epoxy, and...
