Abstract
A fused deposition modeling (FDM) 3D printer extruder was utilized as a micro-furnace draw tower for the direct fabrication of low-cost optical fibers. An air-clad multimode microfiber was drawn from optically transparent polyethylene terephthalate glycol (PETG) filament. A custom-made spooling collection allows for an automatic variation of fiber diameter between ϕ ∼ 72 to 397 μm by tuning the drawing speed. Microstructure imaging as well as the 3D beam profiling of the transmitted beam in the orthogonal axes was used to show good quality, functioning microfiber fabrication with uniform diameter and identical beam profiles for orthogonal axes. The drawn microfiber was used to demonstrate budget smartphone colorimetric-based absorption measurement to detect the degree of adulteration of olive oils with soybean oil.
Highlights
Three-dimensional (3D) printing is a disruptive additive manufacturing technology that offers cost-effectiveness and inherent design flexibility
We demonstrate the direct drawing of air-clad optical microfibers from an extruder head and use these in a smartphone optical fiber sensing application
We demonstrated the potential of a low-cost desktop printer to have excellent micro-furnace extrusion heads suitable for drawing optical fiber directly
Summary
Three-dimensional (3D) printing is a disruptive additive manufacturing technology that offers cost-effectiveness and inherent design flexibility. The temperature distribution and control of even a low budget desktop FDM printer extruder is so good that it can act as a high-quality micro draw tower for producing optical fiber. Due to the high attenuation of polymers optics, low printing resolution, and noticeable surface roughness between successive layers, the 3D-printed object requires additional post-treatment of materials such as thermal annealing [32] and acetone vapor smoothing before use within an application [33,34]. These methods often change the optical properties and geometry of the final object making preemptive high accuracy design challenging. Using disposable sensing components that take detection into the field greatly expands current gold-standard colorimetric diagnostics for detecting various species within a range of biomedical, agricultural, and environmental samples
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