3D Printing Mesoscale Optical Components with a Low-Cost Resin Printer Integrated with a Fiber-Optic Taper

Abstract

Design flexibility, ease of use, and reduced wastage have made additive manufacturing well suited for producing functional prints in many fields including optics. As surface quality is compromised in many cases, postprocessing or better fabrication techniques are required. Advanced fabrication techniques such as two-photon polymerization lithography (TPL) have enabled nanoand microscale fabrications with high surface quality, while postprocessing improves the surface quality of macroscale structures. However, fabricating mesoscale optical components is still challenging as these structures require a lot of time to fabricate with TPL and postprocessing capabilities are limited at these dimensions. Low-cost resin printers are now equipped with 4K resolution screens claiming pixel sizes of ∼35 μm. Still, improvements in print resolution and surface smoothness could be obtained with a simple modification to the setup. Here, we study the impact of introducing a fiber-optic taper to demagnify the images from the screen of a low-cost hobbyist grade resin printer for mesoscale (100 μm to 5 mm) fabrication, achieving a resolution of ∼15 μm half-pitch. We compared normal and modified printing techniques, with gains in resolution used to fabricate a working Fresnel lens.

Continuous Vat Photopolymerization for Optical Lens Fabrication

“…The mask projection system can also be improved, such as better light intensity calibration, expanding the aperture size of the objective lens to provide a larger mask image on the building platform, and reducing pixel sizes. [ 51 ] The use of frustum layer stacking opens a new avenue for 3D printing optical components and other devices that require a high surface roughness and dimensional accuracy. While our current approach has been developed to effectively handle optical lenses with symmetric shapes, how to achieve frustum layer stacking for more complex lens designs such as Kinoform and the freeform lens remains an open research question.…”

Mesotronics: Some New, Unusual Optical Effects

“…A number of new optical effects have been discovered in this field in the last few years. Some physical concepts presented here and in [31,32,36,37,134,135] are very general and their application can be extended in many ways: for instance, to the terahertz, in which the absorption is at least of 3-4 orders higher than in optics, surface plasmons and acoustics, in which the dielectric structure is always anisotropic due to two sound waves (transverse and shear). Mesotronic methods are even applicable to explain some of the effects of the Great Pyramid [136,137], square microresonators [138][139][140], nanopattering [30][31][32]36,37].…”

Imaging/nonimaging microoptical elements and stereoscopic systems based on femtosecond laser direct writing

“…Because of the severe wavelength dependence, the diffraction efficiency decreases substantially with the deviation in the incident wavelength. The HDOE, proposed by Dean Faklis et al, is characterized by the requirement that the optical path length between adjacent surfaces be an integer multiple of the design wavelength λ 0 199 . HDOE can obtain the same focal length at a series of separated wavelengths, effectively eliminating imaging chromatic aberration, and is widely used in infrared imaging systems 200 .…”