Draw Tower Components

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Draw Tower Roller Guide

Modular roller guides are a mandatory requirement for many draw applications particularly for maintain straightness in larger drawn rods or tubes that might otherwise slump or bow with gravity.  Guides are also handy with tractor systems to assure the belts are being worn in different areas particularly in high force applications.  Delicate fiber and composites also require low friction especially in low tension applications to prevent them from bowing and running out of the pulling system.   It is however very important that the guide is extremely smooth with low friction so not to impose vibration or drag in the fiber.  

Advantek Engineering Inc. has many varieties of roller guides including concentric opening,  automatic lump compliance with spring return, micrometer positioning, tilt away to move out of the passline  during startup, ceramic rollers, Teflon Rollers, and custom brackets for direct bolt on.

Miniature Tractor Pull System

In addition to Tractor Pull Systems for standard conventional fiber draw, ribbon draw, wire pulling, and up draw; Advantek Engineering Inc. has designed and built extremely smooth servo driven tractor designs that are small enough to fit 90 mm deep into a Ø20 mm ID tube.   This concentric opening tractor system uses a modular quick change low friction pressure plate guide along with integrated upper and lower Tungsten Carbide die guides.

The belts can be changed quickly and are tensioned independent of the closing mechanism provide precise pneumatic closed force adjustment.

Cutters, Chucks, & Holding Systems

 

Advantek Engineering Inc. has designed many custom glass cutting systems for fiber, multi-fiber, tubes, capillaries, ribbon, and plate using both anvil cutting and scribe and break cut systems.   

When integrated with closed loop and adjustable cut length, these systems provide reliable consistent performance with minimal adjustments.  Our unique scribe and break ribbon and plate cutting systems cut the glass with a Tungsten carbide roller on the fly while moving and carefully stack the glass after break.    Using servos with a roller and variable speed custom anvil system, rods and capillaries can be cut on the fly with minimum dust.  For high speed applications where the glass is subjected to post processing, the concentric anvil cutting system is a proven reliable system that is utilized on many draw tower systems and requires no mechanical adjustments and low cost of ownership.   Advantek Engineering Inc. has also designed many modular, self-aligning, custom chucks systems. 

We have even designed system with multiple tubes inside of each other with one having vacuum and another having mass flow pressure to provide particular geometries of composite glass.  Our standard system using a quick disconnect for draw tower chucks and our more advanced uses precision ball joint with quick release and collision prevention.  

Our custom extruder chucks provide concentric opening and closing, lateral alignment compliance, self-aligning jaws for various geometries, integrated tension measurement, and a mechanism to move the chuck out of the pass line for cleanouts.

Modular Components

 

Advantek Engineering Inc. revolutionized the modular Draw Tower System using twin precision ground rails allowing any component to be moved up or down and be precisely positioned  with little effort.   As experienced glass fiber producers well know, changes in product geometry or size often require a change in the draw tower setup.  The distances between the feed, oven, laser micrometer, and pull system may need to be changed to optimize the draw speed and cooling of the glass.  This is especially important for specialty glass manufacturers that are not making the same product around the clock. 

To support our design intent to provide modular designs in our products; Advantek Engineering Inc. provides all standard products with modular rail mounting allowing securely modular position of individual components as well the ability to increase or decrease the height of the tower as future needs require.