UNMATCHED EXPERIENCE
Verrillon has assembled an unrivaled team of specialty optical fiber veterans. This team includes senior business and technology managers as well as engineering experts with decades of experience in specialty fiber innovation and manufacturing across various industries and applications.
FACILITIES EQUIPMENT
Verrillon has designed and built an advanced fiber development and manufacturing facility in North Grafton, Massachusetts (about 40 miles west of Boston). Verrillon’s facility is equipped with state-of-the-art, custom designed fiber manufacturing equipment, making it the most advanced specialty optical fiber plant in the industry. Verrillon’s facility is ISO 9001:2000 Certified. A description of some of the key manufacturing equipment is given below.
Infrastructure
Verrillon’s facility is large in scale in part to facilitate large scale manufacture, but also to allow manufacturing flexibility. The current size of the facility is 40,000 square feet, with the flexibility of non-disruptive scaling 100,000 square feet. In order to maintain the integrity of glass quality at all times, the areas housing preform deposition and fiber draw are class 50,000 clean rooms. The facility also has a ventilated chemistry laboratory for use in the preparation of novel fiber coatings.
Preform Manufacture
Verrillon has several preform manufacturing systems. These systems have all been fitted with custom modifications to better control the preform diameter, straightness, deposition composition and thickness, as well as additions that facilitate novel doping materials. This customization allows excellent manufacturing control while retaining the flexibility required of a specialty fiber manufacturer.
Verrillon’s flexible equipment design allows for the manufacture of small prototype preforms as well as large size ones that yield several hundreds of kilometers of fiber. The vertical over-sleeving capability provides excellent roundness in the finished fiber.
Fiber Draw
Unlike most other specialty optical fiber manufacturers, Verrillon uses tall draw towers, which offer a number of benefits including faster fiber draw and the ability to utilize a wide variety of different coatings and inline processing stations for new fiber designs.
Verrillon’s draw towers are 20m high, which enable fiber draw speeds, with standard telecommunications type coatings of up to 1500m/minute with cladding diameters of either 125µm or 80µm. However, the main reason for these tall towers is to enable manufacturing flexibility, and the amount of ‘real-estate’ that is available on these towers means that multiple coating stations can be mounted on the tower simultaneously and swung in and out of the fiber train when required. This means that equipment usage is maximized when switching between different product types and that manufacturing tolerances are preserved by eliminating set-up between draws.
Many specialized fiber coating require low speed draw to allow multiple coating applications in order to build up sufficient coating thickness. This is often achieved by having additional coating stations off of the tower to extend the distance between preform and fiber spool. Verrillon’s draw towers have been optimized to run at the slow draw speeds required for this coating type and the height of the tower means that all coating application can be done in a single span. This means that there is no need for additional interference with the unfinished fiber which can affect the integrity of the coating and thus the finished fiber strength.
In addition to the clean environment, Verrillon’s draw towers feature HEPA filters along the entire length of the tower where glass is exposed the atmosphere to provide additional cleanliness and ensure the highest mechanical performance of the fiber.
Test and Measurement
In our North Grafton facility there are three dedicated test and measurement laboratories. The first of these is located with the manufacturing area and is where the principal optical and mechanical preform and fiber tests are carried out. This area includes equipment for mapping preforms (mechanical and refractive index measurements), and fiber measurements including attenuation, cut-off wavelength and mode-field diameter as well as geometrical data such as cladding/coating diameter, core concentricity, fiber circularity.
A second test lab focuses on fiber strength and reliability. Within this area, we have equipment for prooftesting, dynamic fatigue measurement, as well as in-house environmental testing.
A third test and measurement lab is designed for non-standard fiber testing such as rare-earth doped fiber characterization and polarization-maintaining fiber measurement.
Environmental Regulations
Verrillon operates, and will continue to operate its facilities in accordance with all applicable federal, state and local environmental health and safety regulations including the Clean Air Act and the Federal Water Pollution Control Act.