Abstract
Complex optical devices including aspherical focusing mirrors, solar concentrator arrays, and immersion lenses were 3D printed using commercial technology and experimentally demonstrated by evaluating surface roughness and shape. The as-printed surfaces had surface roughness on the order of tens of microns. To improve this unacceptable surface quality for creating optics, a polymer smoothing technique was developed. Atomic force microscopy and optical profilometry showed that the smoothing technique reduced the surface roughness to a few nanometers, consistent with the requirements of high-quality optics, while tests of optical functionality demonstrated that the overall shapes were maintained so that near theoretically predicted operation was achieved. The optical surface smoothing technique is a promising approach towards using 3D printing as a flexible tool for prototyping and fabrication of miniaturized high-quality optics.
Highlights
Additive manufacturing and three-dimensional (3D)printing have improved access to and flexibility of highquality fabrication technology with profound impact on a number of industries[1], including automotive, electronics[2,3,4], aerospace, bio-engineering[5,6], and microfluidics[7]
Green 1.556 μm Discussion and conclusions Our results show that the inherent surface roughness of
Our experiments show that StereoLithography Apparatus (SLA) and wax printers created better optical devices than the other printing technologies that were tested
Summary
Optical parts were designed and simulated with ray tracing software. The shapes were reproduced in the STL (STereoLithography) file format, which is one of the standard file formats of 3D printing. None of these methods create the nanometer scale smooth surfaces required for optical applications To meet this surface roughness criterion, we coated the printed optics with a UV curable polymer mixture consisting of methacrylates, acrylates, and urethane based polymers[18]. The resulting 3D printed mirrors behaved as expected for flat Al across the 200–1800 nm wavelength range with no detectable anomalies due to surface roughness, verified by spectrophotometer specular reflection measurements at several locations and different incidence angles. The difference between this UV gel smoothing method and other optical
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