Free Surface Flow in High Speed Fiber Drawing With Large-Diameter Glass Preforms

Abstract

This paper presents a complete two-dimensional (2D) thermofluid model for predicting the neck-down shape in the fiber drawing process. This model uses the controlled draw tension to calculate the Neumann boundary condition at the furnace exit; thus, it does not require specifying the speed (or diameter) of the fiber as most previous studies did. The model presented here can be applied to optimization of the high-speed draw process with large-diameter preforms. In this study, the radiative transfer equation is directly solved for the radiation fluxes using the discrete ordinate method coupled with the solution of the free surface flow, which does not assume that the glass is optically thick and does not neglect the glass absorption at the short-wavelength band. The artificial compressibility method is used to solve the Navier-Stokes equations. A staggered-grid computation scheme that is shown to be efficient and robust was used to reduce the computation load in solving the complete 2D model. The neck-down profile of a large preform (9 cm dia) drawn at a relatively high speed of 25 m/s was experimentally measured. The measured profile well matches that derived numerically. Results also show that the free surface calculated using the Dirichlet boundary condition deviates considerably from the measured profile, particularly near the furnace exit where the actual diameter (and, hence, the speed of the glass) is essentially unknown. Although the difference between the numerical results obtained from the full and semi-2D models was small, this difference could be significant if the location at which the glass converges to 125 μm dia is of interest, especially when the preform has a large diameter drawn at a high speed.