Fully monolithic and additively manufactured mounting structures for optical elements

Abstract

Additive Manufacturing (AM) processes improved to such an extent, that they are now applied for production of optical elements like lenses, mirrors and light guides. However, since the quality of these manufacturing processes still does not meet typical surface roughness specifications for optical surfaces, except on the micrometer scale, additional effort for post processing is required. It is therefore more convenient to use the potential of AM to build the mounting structures of optical systems and use more suitable technologies for the optical surface production. For that reason, we develop additively manufactured and monolithic mounting structures using the design freedom and flexibility of AM and combine them with macroscopic lenses of excellent optical quality. To evaluate our concept, we measured the modulation transfer function (MTF) of a commercial photo lens. We replaced its mounting structure with our additively manufactured and monolithic one and measured the MTF again. It could be demonstrated that the replaced mounting structure has a nearly identical optical performance and even an improvement in the off-axis fields, due to less tolerance chains.