Experimental investigation

The impact of drawing parameters on the structure of solid-core axisymmetric structured optical fibres (SOF) stacked to form four hexagonal rings of air-holes is investigated. The modelling of the internal capillary structure on optical fibre drawing using an unconstrained applied internal pressure in analogous single-capillary is contested. A corrected single-capillary function to cater for multi-capillary structural constraint within a larger single capillary draw, whilst retaining analytical simplicity, is proposed and shown to give reasonable and meaningful fits with experiments.