Manufacture of Lenses and Diffraction Gratings Using DLP As an Additive Manufacturing Technology

This document condenses the results obtained when 3D printing lenses and their potential use as diffraction gratings using Digital Light Processing (DLP), as an additive manufacturing technique. This project investigated the feasibility of using DLP additive manufacturing for producing custom designed lenses and gratings. DLP was identified as the preferred manufacturing technology for gratings fabrication. Diffraction gratings take advantage of the anisotropy, inherent in additive manufacturing processes, to produce a collated pattern of multiple fringes on a substrate with completely smooth surfaces. The gratings are transmissive and were manufactured with slit separations of 10, 25 and 50 μm. More than 50 samples were printed at various build angles and mechanically treated for maximum optical transparency. The variables of the irradiance equation were obtained from photographs taken with an optical microscope. These values were used to estimate theoretical irradiance patterns of a diffraction grating and compared against the experimental 3-D printed grating. The resulting patterns were found to be remarkably similar in amplitude and distance between peaks when compared to theoretical values.