Drawing optical fibers from three-dimensional printers

Abstract

The temperature distribution within extrusion nozzles of three low cost desktop 3D printers are characterised using fibre Bragg gratings (FBGs) to assess their compatibility as micro-furnaces for topical fibre and taper production. These profiles show remarkably consistent distributions suitable for direct drawing of optical fibre. As proof of principle, coreless optical fibres (ϕ = 30 µm) made from fluorinated acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) and polyethylene terephthalate glycol (PETG) are drawn. Cut-back measurements demonstrate propagation transmission losses as low as α = 0.26 dB/cm, comparable with standard optical fibre losses with some room for improvement. This work points towards direct optical fibre manufacture of any material from 3D printers.

Hollow-core fiber with nested anti-resonant tubes for low-loss THz guidance

“…We numerically show that the proposed HC-NANF offers record low effective material loss, broad transmission bandwidth centered at 1 THz, near-zero waveguide dispersion, bend-improved performance and effectively single mode operation while the fiber design relies upon experimentally feasible and realistic fabrication parameters. This is because it has been reported that fiber geometries similar to the ones proposed here can be fabricated using the recent emerging technique of 3D printing [24,25]. Optimizing the design parameters, we predict an effective material loss of 0.05 dB/m; a confinement loss of 3.4 × 10 -4 dB/m at 1 THz; a bending loss of 10 -2 dB/m at 45 cm bending radius; a low-loss transmission band from 0.8 THz to 1.2 THz, for which the total transmission loss is below 0.095 dB/m; and a 0.6 THz flat dispersion band where the dispersion parameter β2 is less than 0.115993251 ps/THz/cm.…”

3D Printing in Fiber-Device Technology

“…Furthermore, beyond preform fabrication, drawing fiber directly from a 3D printed preform has been proposed and demonstrated by Canning et al [48], where they first used acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) to get coreless optical fibers with standard losses. Later, the same research group applied direct light processing (DLP) to obtain a glass perform [49].…”

An Epsilon-Near-Zero (ENZ) Based, Ultra-Wide Bandwidth Terahertz Single-Polarization Single-Mode Photonic Crystal Fiber

“…A more recent approach is to use 3D printing techniques. Successful 3D printed preforms and the corresponding drawn microstructured optical fibers have been reported [29][30][31]. All of these methods can be applied to realize a prototype of our SPSM PCF design.…”