Modeling the fabrication of hollow fibers: capillary drawing

©2001 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.A method for modeling the fabrication of small-scale hollow glass capillaries is developed. The model is based on an asymptotic analysis of the Navier-Stokes equations, which yields a simple closed-form solution for this problem. We demonstrate the validity of this approach using experimental data and use it to make predictions for a range of regimes of interest for the development of microstructured optical fiber technology.Alistair D. Fitt, Kentaro Furusawa, Tanya M. Monro, and Colin P. Pleas