Is it possible to print with their help the optical elements? For example lens from the plastic? The relevant references and links are welcome! Thank you in advance!
There is a Dutch company called LUXeXceL that is making 3D printed optics. I've never used their products, though.
I don't know much about the operation, but I think that the primary difficulty in making 3D printed optics is with assuring that impurities and imperfections are at a minimum to reduce scattering from within the printed element.
http://www.luxexcel.com/
We have a 3D printer from 3D Systems (HD 3000) and we have built some lenses and diffraction arrays for sub-THz waves (few GHz up to 300 GHz i.e. wavelength > 1 mm). It works very well as the acrylic plastic we have used presents a constant refractive index vs frequency and a quite low absorption coefficient. So if you are working in the far infrared, I would say yes, no problem. However if you are working in the IR or the visible, I am afraid that the voxels of 3D printers are still much too big (typical voxels with high quality 3D printers are 16 to 40 µm wide). They are two important things to consider:
- the size of the voxel that must be much smaller than the wavelength -
@Lionel,
Are the images obtained using printed optical elements have same quality as these which obtained using not printed optical elements? Are you performed comparison between images?
Yes, for frequencies up to a few tens of GHz, our customer for which we build diffaction arrays and lenses for the GHz range have told us that there is no difference between simulation and experimental data as soon as they enter the actual refractive index and the absorption coefficient in the simulations. The refractive index and the absorption coefficient were measured using THz time-domain spectroscopy by laboratory IMEP-LAHC in which I was before creating Kapteos company.
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