Optical fibers with special shaped cores drawn from 3D printed preforms

Low-Cost 3D Printer Drawn Optical Microfibers for Smartphone Colorimetric Detection

“…Initially, 3D-printing in photonics began with the fabrication of polymer optics using FDM printers [ 12 , 13 ], because of the low extrusion temperature of desktop printing, whilst most recent works demonstrated the fabrication of silica fiber [ 14 ]. The process offers great flexibility for structural fiber fabrication although it still relies on the traditional drawing process to fabricate the final fiber from the preform [ 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 ]. This drawing process is expensive, especially for application-specific optical fibers where volume demand is not there to bring costs down.…”

Continuous Fabrication of Microstructured Fibers for THz Communications Using Infinite 3D Printing

“…Due to thermo-mechanical nature of the process, FDM resolution is limited by the nozzle opening that normally exceeds 200 µm. At the same time, FDM techniques can use a variety of polymer materials that in the THz range (0.1-0.3 THz) featuring medium-losses (~0.1-5 cm -1 ) Poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) [26], Polyethylene Terephthalate Glycol (PETG) [27], Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene (ABS) [28,29], Polycarbonate (PC) [30], Polylactic Acid (PLA) [1], or low-losses (~0.01-0.5 cm -1 ) such as Polystyrene (PS) [31], High Density Polyethylene (HDPE) [32], Cyclic Olefin Copolymer (also known as TOPAS) [33] and Polypropylene (PP) [15,34]. Moreover, build volumes of FDM systems can be as big as 1m in every direction.…”

Fabrication of Low Loss and Near Zero Dispersion Suspended Core Polypropylene Fibers for Terahertz Communications Using Infinity 3D Printing Technique

“…Moreover, FDM technique became the most fashionable one in directly printing MPWG due to that the wavelength of THz wave is comparable to the printing resolution. In addition, the FDM technique can be applied to variety of polymer materials, such as Poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) [49], Polyethylene Terephthalate Glycol (PETG) [50,51], Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene (ABS) [51][52][53][54], Polystyrene (PS) [55,56], Polycarbonate (PC) [57], Polylactic Acid (PLA) [2,58], High Density Polyethylene (HDPE) [59] and Polypropylene (PP) [60,61].…”