High-Performance Optical 3D Printer based on both Single and Two-Photon Excitation Phenomena

Summary

The three-dimensional printer has received great attention during the past few years and has become used in several fields such as agriculture, healthcare, automotive industry, aircraft, smart cities, as well as trains. As it contributes to building complex models and structures with high efficiency and in small amount of time. Optical-based 3D printers have enabled miniaturizing and fabricating devices and tools with complex, fine structures, and functions, whish draw a considerable serious attention imputed to their applications demands in medical, dental, optoelectronic, nano-photonics, and micro-robotics devices and tools in micro and nano scale. Unlike non-optical printers, this kind of 3D printer has significant advantages, such as high resolution, accuracy, and printing speed. Many applications and tools can be miniaturized and manufactured using this technology such as multipass gas cells, optical waveguides, and optical integrated circuits…etc. However, this technology still a laboratory tool due to its high operation cost and limited fabrication rate; the on-the-shelf optical printers are with high cost and low resolution.

Here, A straightforward approach is established for building a novel optical engine for an optical-based 3D printer considering some problems facing this new technology such as the low output power, cost and the printing speed of the fiber-based engine; also the low output power and the contrast of the Digital Light Processing DLP-based 3D printer. Our aim is to demonstrate the potential to print complex freeform optics with sub-millimeter dimensions in the range using our optical engine. This engine is a digital light processing engine combined with the direct laser writing technology with a feedback loop.

The basic operation of this attractive printing process is the photopolymerization of a light-sensitive resin via an ultrafast ultrashort laser pulses (Power = 33mW, wavelength = 1550nm) and pulsed ultraviolet LED (Power = 6W, wavelength = 405nm). This 3D printer is composed of two main parts: first, the fiber-based 3D printer that relies on the two-photon absorption phenomenon for a photopolymer; second, the DLP-based 3D printer, which relies on the single-photon excitation for also a photopolymer. The project is still not fully commercial and only made in labs. We aim to make it available on the shelf for every institution and company. Also a novel numerical model for modeling the DLP-based engine and is also presented which can be verified by experiments and printing results.

Achievements

List of Publications from the Project

Partners

Project Members

• Mayar Magdy Abdelrazik Elashry Nassar
• Alaa Eldeen Fathy
• Mostafa El-Aasser
• Diaa A. M. KHALIL

Project Leaders