Abstract
A modern optical fiber manufacturing process requires the sufficient cooling of glass fibers freshly drawn from the heated and softened silica preform in the furnace, since the inadequately cooled glass fibers are known to cause improper polymer resin coating on the fiber surface and to adversely affect the product quality of optical fibers. In order to greatly enhance the fiber cooling effectiveness at increasingly high fiber drawing speed, it is necessary to use a dedicated glass fiber cooling unit with helium gas injection between glass fiber drawing and coating processes. The present numerical study features a series of three-dimensional flow and heat transfer computations on the cooling gas and the fast moving glass fiber to analyze the cooling performance of glass fiber cooling unit, in which the helium is supplied through the discretely located rectangular injection holes. The air entrainment into the cooling unit at the fiber inlet is also included in the computational model and it is found to be critical in determining the helium purity in the cooling gas and the cooling effectiveness on glass fiber. The effects of fiber drawing speed and helium injection rate on the helium purity decrease by air entrainment and the glass fiber cooling are also investigated and discussed.
