AUTHORS:

Djordjevic A., Ebendorff-Heidepriem H., Wu K.S., Salih E., Wei Y., Ng A., Stepniewski G., Bienias P., Arat M.A., Moser H., Buczynski R., Leyer S.

ABSTRACT:

NASA findings suggest that ZBLAN optical fibers can be produced with greater quality when drawn in space. To validate those results, we have built a compact and fully automated drawing tower, designed to be flown on the International Space Station and draw significant lengths of ZBLAN fiber to create enough data for analysis. Before flight, the optical properties of two ZBLAN optical fibers were compared. One fiber was drawn using our miniaturized and automated drawing tower and the other was drawn using a conventional drawing tower. Both fibers were drawn on ground, i.e. under gravity, from preforms made under identical conditions within the uncertainty of the manual process of glass casting during preform fabrication. The comparison considers fiber drawing and geometry characteristics, as well as fiber optical properties. This research was done to show that our compact and automated drawing tower produces fiber with the same optical performance as the conventional drawing tower, therefore proving that any fiber created in microgravity can be compared to data produced using conventional drawing towers.

Journal of Physics: Photonics, 2026, vol. 8(3), art. 035016