Optical couplers and step-index fibers fabricated using FDM 3D printers

David R. Gozzard*, Rebecca Craine, Deon Hickey, Alex Martin, William Shen, Bailey Sones

*Corresponding author for this work

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    2 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    Step-index optical fiber preforms are manufactured and drawn into fibers using low-cost consumer-grade fused deposition modeling (FDM) 3D printers with no other specialist tooling. The fibers are fabricated from polyethylene terephthalate glycol (PETG) cladding with an acrylonitrile buatadiene styrene (ABS) core, resulting in V < 2.4 after drawing. The fibers are measured to have a loss of α ≈ 0.78 dB/cm, which matches previous polymer fibers manufactured using draw towers. The printing of multimode optical couplers with reliable 50:50 split ratios is also demonstrated. This work points toward the fabrication of useful and bespoke optical devices with low-cost 3D printers.

    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)5124-5127
    Number of pages4
    JournalOptics Letters
    Volume47
    Issue number19
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 1 Oct 2022

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