Chemical Smoothing as a Method to Manufacture High Quality 3D Printed Optical Components

Abstract

Optical components fabricated using traditional methods are well known as being costly. A potentially cheaper alternative method is 3D printing, however the post-printing processes to reach a desirable finish can also be expensive. This is due to the requirement for several stages of polishing and the use of high-quality metals for strong reflectance percentages. We propose a chemical smoothing post-printing method to produce high quality optical components, for use in the THz region, which are able to achieve comparable performance to commercial components at a significantly reduced cost.