Developing an efficient regime for the thermal stabilization of polyacrylonitrile roving in a “Vulon” furnace

A mathematical model is constructed to describe conjugate radiative-convective heat transfer in the working space of a “Vulon” furnace, which is designed for the thermal stabilization of raw materials used in the production of carbon fibers. A program was written in the language C++ to realize the model in the environment Builder 6.0. The program was used to study the thermal performance of the furnace, and temperature regimes were devised to allow problem-free thermal stabilization of polyacrylonitride rovings. It is shown that the stabilization operation can be automated by controlling the power supplied to electric heaters installed in the channels of the furnace.