The traditional process of making glass lenses requires grinding and polishing of the material which is a tedious and sensitive process. Existing polymer lens making techniques, such as high temperature reflow techniques, have been significantly simple lens making processes which cater well to customer industry. Recently, the use of UV-curing liquid lens has ushered in customized lens making (Printed Optics), but contains undesirable yellowing effects. Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) is a transparent polymer curable at low temperature (<100 o C) provides an alternative to lens making. In this work, we showed that PDMS lenses are fabricated using single silicone droplets which are formed in a guided and controlled passive manner using 3D printed tools. These silicone lenses have attributes such as smoothness of curvature, resilience to temperature change, low optical aberrations, high transparency (>95%) and minimal aging (yellowing). Moreover, these lenses have a range of focal lengths (3.5 mm to 14.5 mm as well as magnifications (up to). In addition, we created smartphone attachment to turn smart device (tablet or smartphone) into a low-powered microscope. In future we plan to extend this method to produce microlens array.
The growing power of imaging and computing power of smartphones is creating the possibility of converting your smartphone into a high power pocket microscopy system. High quality miniature microscopy lenses attached to smartphone are typically made with glass or plastics that can only be produce at low cost with high volume. To revise the paradigm of microscope lenses, we devised a simple droplet lens fabrication technique that which produces low cost and high performance lens. Each lens is integrated into thin 3-D printed holder with complimentary light emitted diode (LEDs) that clips onto majority of smartphones. The integrated device converts a smartphone into a high power optical microscope/dermatoscope at around $2. This low cost device has wide application in a multitude of practical uses such as material inspection, dermascope and educational microscope.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
customersupport@researchsolutions.com
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.