Experimental and numerical analysis of gas flow in nodeless antiresonant hollow-core fibers for optimization of laser gas spectroscopy sensors
Piotr Bojęś, Piotr Jaworski, Karol Krzempek, Ziemowit Malecha, Fei Yu, Dakun Wu, Paweł Kozioł, Grzegorz Dudzik, Meisong Liao, Krzysztof M. Abramski
Abstract
In this paper, we present the pressure-driven gas flow studies in nodeless antiresonant hollow-core fibers (ARHCFs) for laser absorption spectroscopy (LAS) applications. The OpenFOAM® software was used for gas flow modeling for comparison with experimental data. The experimental LAS-based setup utilizing a 14.73 m long fiber, was used to gas exchange time measurements for various pressure differences (1.5–5 bar). The obtained results have shown that the application of a precise fiber geometrical representation and a compressible flow model improves the correlation between simulations and experiments for nodeless ARHCFs, in comparison to cylindrical channel approximation and an incompressible model. We believe that our work will help optimize the selection of the proper ARHCF during sensor design, where the fiber type and length can significantly determine the obtainable response time of the detector and its overall compactness.