Adhesive bonding and miscellaneous chemical manufacture – Surface bonding means and/or assembly means therefor – With bending – folding – winding – or wrapping means
Patent
1989-09-27
1991-11-12
Bueker, Richard
Adhesive bonding and miscellaneous chemical manufacture
Surface bonding means and/or assembly means therefor
With bending, folding, winding, or wrapping means
156441, 156433, 156166, B32B 3100
Patent
active
050644963
DESCRIPTION:
BRIEF SUMMARY
FIELDS OF THE ART
The present invention relates to methods for collecting yarns comprising a plurality of fibrous substances more densely and loading the collected yarns into a cylindrical case, and apparatuses therefor. Particularly, the present invention relates to improved methods for collecting hollow fibers, and loading them into a cylindrical case and apparatuses therefor, which are suitable for producing a hollow fiber type of separatory apparatus suitable for fluid separation.
BACKGROUND OF THE ART
In fluid separation apparatuses, there are several types of membrane forms for fluid separation, for example, plane membranes, tubes, hollow fibers, etc. Among them, hollow fibers have a large membrane area for the size of the case, thus the fluid separation apparatuses therefrom can be advantageously made compact and easy to be operated. Today this type of the fluid separation apparatuses are primarily used.
The process for producing fluid separation apparatuses of a hollow fiber type comprises (1) forming a bundle of hollow fibers of a prescribed count, (2) loading the yarn bundle into a cylindrical case, for example, a plastic case, (3) potting the bundle of hollow fibers to both ends of the case with a resin such as polyurethane, (4) exposing fiber openings by cutting both potted ends of the bundle and (5) fixing the product to the headers.
Collection of hollow fibers into a bundle and encasement thereof have been mainly performed manually conventionally, thus the quality of the products tends to vary too widely, and the production efficiency remains low, thus, the development of a new efficient production method has been desired eagerly.
In the production of a bundle of hollow fibers of a prescribed count, the total cross-section of the bundle is generally formed into a flat, round or square shape, depending on the cases, and the cross section of the bundle is required to be almost the same as the inner cross section of the case, and the sizes of the cross section, namely the diameter, if the cross section is round, or the major and minor axes, if elliptical, or the length and width, if rectangular, should be the same as or just a little smaller than those of the case, when a bundle is loaded into the case.
When it satisfies these conditions, the bundle of yarn fibers formed can be readily loaded into the case, but, if not, the shape of its cross-section should be modified.
Heretofore, it has been ordinary that the shape modification of the cross section is mainly performed manually because of the difficulty of the modification of the cross section by an apparatus. In addition, the bundle of hollow fibers which has been modified by hand is usually loaded into the case by hand carefully and slowly. Such handiwork, however, must largely rely on the art of each worker, resulting in fluctuations in the product quality as well as the productivity. The present invention is to resolve these problems.
Moreover, with reference to the production of a fluid separation apparatus of a hollow fiber type such as a hemodialyzer, one of conventional methods for loading a bundle of permselective hollow fibers into the cylindrical case of a fluid separator comprises binding each bundle of hollow fibers with a tape at both ends and pushing one end of the bundle forcibly by hand into the case, or connecting a string through the cylindrical case to one end of the yarn bundle and pulling the other end of the string to introduce the bundle into the case.
In these conventional methods, a skilled worker is required to adjust the form of the fiber bundles by hand for inserting them into the cylindrical case one by one carefully, and such low efficiencies of these operations have been the bottle neck for efficient production of the fluid separation apparatuses of a hollow fiber type with productivity increased. In addition, the friction with the wall surface on the insertion tends to disturb the parallelism of the hollow fibers, and sometimes causes deterioration such as breakage of the hollow fibers, which results in lowe
REFERENCES:
patent: 3120690 (1964-02-01), Stevens
patent: 4061574 (1977-12-01), Clark
patent: 4224094 (1980-09-01), Amicel et al.
patent: 4842620 (1989-06-01), Hammel et al.
Asanuma Akira
Shida Tomonori
Barker Robert
Bueker Richard
Teijin Limited
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