Canadian Journal of Pure & Applied Sciences

Abstract: Whenever light passes from one medium to another, a small portion is always reflected back into the first material. Also, fibres in plantain pseudo-stems are natural fibres, which suffer from thinning, non-uniformity of fibre circumference, knots and other imperfections along their lengths. These are in addition to the plantain fibre characteristics of dispersion, bandwidth, attenuation, equilibrium mode distribution and numerical aperture. Using Snell’s law, refractive index and velocity of light, the critical angle of light in plantain fibres was estimated. The results showed that the critical angle was approximately 35.26o and Fresnel reflection was approximately 0.072. It is also known that if the rays of light propagated in the plantain fibres are less than the critical angle of the plantain fibre core, the rays of light are confined to the core. It is this property of light rays confinement in fibre core that lend themselves to applications in optical communication systems. Consequently, the optical properties derivable from plantain fibre critical angle determination, and with proper modifications and manufacture, could find applications in pulse propagation, optical interconnections in microelectronics, optical computing, photonic switching, analogue optical computing, artificial intelligence and associated memory operations in neural networks. It is, strongly recommended that further research be carried out on the optical properties of plantain pseudo-stems fibres that would enable us derive more benefits in their application, than is currently the case.