Finally, the researchers performed high-temperature sintering to remove any additional impurities and fuse silica nanoparticles into glass during fiber drawing.īy introducing several active dopants into the additive manufacturing process, the researchers showed that a diversity of materials can be used for 3D printing of optical fiber preforms. The fourth step was a de-binding and pre-sintering process, driven by annealing, to remove moisture.
This step was followed by thermal polymerization. They printed the preform using a commercial DLP 3D printer then they filled the prepared resin into the holes of the printed cladding preform. First, the researchers prepared ultraviolet (UV)-sensitive resin embedded with amorphous silica nanoparticles. The fabrication of the 3D-printed preforms involved five steps. (a) Images of the 3D-printed preforms and subsequently filled cores (b) optical fiber drawing tower used in this experiment (c) temperature change of the fiber drawing process (d) loss spectrum of the 3D-printed single-core and loss of seven-core fibers at 632.8 nm (e) emission spectra of a single-core fiber excited by the 830 and 980 nm lasers. The capability to 3D-print complex geometries such as multicore fibers could help advance the development of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies. They constructed single- and multimode optical fibers by controlling the printing parameters during the fiber draw process. Using digital light processing (DLP) 3D-printing technology, the researchers extended small-scale glass “bulk or slice” printing of optical fiber preforms beyond a few millimeters to the centimeter scale. According to the research team, additive manufacturing, also known as 3D printing, could transform the way specialty optical fibers are fabricated. Researchers at Harbin Engineering University and the University of New South Wales demonstrated the additive manufacture of silica optical fiber preforms.
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