THERMO-FLUID ANALYSIS ON THE HELIUM INJECTION COOLING OF GLASS FIBER FOR HIGH SPEED OPTICAL FIBER MANUFACTURING

광섬유 고속생산용 헬륨 주입식 유리섬유 냉각공정에 대한 열유동 해석

In manufacturing optical fibers, the process starts with the glass fiber drawing from the heated and softened silica preform in the furnace, and the freshly drawn glass fiber is still at high temperature when it leaves the glass fiber drawing furnace. It is necessary to cool down the glass fiber to the ambient temperature before it then enters the fiber coating applicator, since the hot glass fiber is known to cause several technical difficulties in achieving high quality fiber coating. As the fiber drawing speed keeps increasing, a current manufacturing of optical fibers requires a dedicated cooling unit with helium gas injection. A series of three-dimensional flow and heat transfer computations are carried out to investigate the effectiveness of fiber cooling in the fiber cooling unit. The glass fiber cooling unit is simplified into the long cylindrical enclosure at which the hot glass fiber passes through at high speed, and the helium is being supplied through several injection slots of rectangular shape along the cooling unit. This study presents and discusses the effects of helium injection rates on the glass fiber cooling rates.