Replicative manufacturing of metal moulds for low surface roughness polymer replication

Abstract

Tool based manufacturing processes like injection moulding allow fast and high-quality mass-market production, but for optical polymer components the production of the necessary tools is time-consuming and expensive. In this paper a process to fabricate metal-inserts for tool based manufacturing with smooth surfaces via a casting and replication process from fused silica templates is presented. Bronze, brass and cobalt-chromium could be successfully replicated from shaped fused silica replications achieving a surface roughnesses of Rq 8 nm and microstructures in the range of 5 µm. Injection moulding was successfully performed, using a commercially available injection moulding system, with thousands of replicas generated from the same tool. In addition, three-dimensional bodies in metal could be realised with 3D-Printing of fused silica casting moulds. This work thus represents an approach to high-quality moulding tools via a scalable facile and cost-effective route surpassing the currently employed cost-, labour- and equipment-intensive machining techniques.

Preparation of Superhydrophobic Coating on X80 Steel and Its Corrosion Resistance in Oilfield Produced Water

“…Figure e–h illustrates a large undulation of the rough structure of the copper film, and the roughness gradually increases with the extension of the deposition time. In Figure i, R a (the mean value of the absolute value at the reference length) and R p (the height of the highest peak in the profile curve at the reference length), as parameters that can characterize the roughness information on the surface, are positively correlated to the deposition time, , and the parameters are taken from the average roughness of the three regions on the sample. Taken together, the observations suggest that the roughness of the copper-plated layer increases as the deposition time increases.…”

Precise and Rapid Replication of Complex‐Shaped Fused Silica Optics

“…Photocurable Silica Precursor Preparation: In the PSP slurry, the silica nanopowders with average diameters of around 40 nm (Aerosi OX50, Evonik, Germany) were mixed with the photocurable resins. [16][17][18][19][20][21] The photocurable resin contained the photoinitiator diphenyl (2,4,6trimethylbenzoyl) phosphine oxide (TPO), monomer 2-Hydroxyethyl methacrylate (HEMA), and coupler tetraethylene glycol diacrylate (TEGDA). In addition, the 2-Phenoxyethanol (POE) served as the solvent to mix those macromolecular materials homogeneously.…”

“…This precursor shaping method was then successfully applied for the generation of microfluid chips, origami, hollow microstructures, and casting mold for metals, to mention a few. [18][19][20][21] Furthermore, taking advantage of the photocurable precursors, the two-photon polymerization, [2,22] projection stereolithography, [23,24] or volumetric additive manufacturing [25] were developed for fast prototyping of transparent fused silica components with complex 3D shapes. Although additive manufacturing was almost universal for generating 3D fused silica components with arbitrary shapes, it is more suitable for fast prototyping than mass production.…”

Microfluidics assisted optics manufacturing technique

“…Harnessing surface tension for shaping optics is a widely used technique [11][12][13]. It was employed as early as the 1660s to make small lenses for the use as the magnifying lens with molten glass [14]. Shaping liquid surface requires the cooperation of intermolecular force of the liquid and environmental factors.…”