Direct fabrication of silicone lenses with 3D printed parts

Abstract

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.

Optical 3D printing: bridging the gaps in the mesoscale

“…Because of an unmatched design freedom, plasmonic or microelectronic systems created using LIFT are also considered (figure 6(c)) [59,85,86]. Application of O3DP in optical component fabrication is another active field [87,88], as it promises relatively simple free-form objects for light shaping. All in all, while most of these approaches are in the testing phase, there is no doubt that O3DP will become a standard industrial tool in the near future for the transformational fourth generation of industrial technologies.…”

Thermal Effects in Single-Point Curing Process for Pulsed Infrared Laser-Assisted 3D Printing of Optics

“…23 A printing approach using a passive droplet dispenser has been investigated to fabricate a lens from optical silicone, but the reported method cannot control the lens shape either. 24 We have proposed a precision additive freeform optics manufacturing (AFOM) method based on local thermal curing of optical silicones using pulsed infrared (IR) laser. 25 Generally speaking, our method belongs to vat polymerization printing, and a container filled with cell-hydrogel suspension is subjected to selective curing of polymer to form 3D structures.…”