SoliForum - 3D Printing Community — 3d printing of an optical lens

Re: 3d printing of an optical lens

2014-04-03T10:18:01Z

its very interesting thanks for sharing

Re: 3d printing of an optical lens

2014-02-21T17:07:11Z

I wonder about publishing something that could keep the adverse form of an visual area, like publishing a telescope reflection, removing it, and then silvering it.

Re: 3d printing of an optical lens

2014-01-17T02:41:07Z

That sounds very interesting! Definitely gonna keep an eye on this thread..

Re: 3d printing of an optical lens

2014-01-16T09:26:38Z

Hello,
I noticed our company was mentioned here, and I wanted to shed some light on the current situation.

3D printing a lens is possible with our companies recently developed "printoptical technology" With this technology polishing is no longer necessary.

LUXeXceL has developed a revolutionary 3D printing technology for making perfectly smooth surfaces. The company is fully focused on enabling design, rapid prototyping optics, and manufacturing of optics, lenses and optical surfaces so there is no longer a difference in making 1, 10, 100 or 1000 pieces. This Technology is called Printoptical Technology, a patented one-step-CAD-to-optic manufacturing process. Unique is that there is no need for post-processing (grinding, polishing / coloring etc.). Recently LUXeXceL came in the picture globally as a proof of concept has been printed: A functional pair of glasses (frame + lenses in one print job). Momentarily the company is focused on supporting the LED lighting industry with the possibility to offer customized optics and even great free-form designs.

I invite you to visit our website for more information

Re: 3d printing of an optical lens

2013-08-23T14:30:10Z

Maybe the 3D printer would be more useful for designing equipment for making custom lens? For example, using computer scripts scripts to generate joints that would transform a rotational (motor) input into a different grinding/shaving motion depending what kind of lens you wanted. Then the printer would make the joints, which could be applied to the generic "lens making" device to enable it to make a different lens.

Re: 3d printing of an optical lens

2013-08-02T19:08:06Z

Hello Everyone,

I, too, am very interested in this topic. I am a lay person so I don't profess to have technical savvy; just a commercial interest.

Thanx

Re: 3d printing of an optical lens

2013-07-12T20:48:42Z

Hi All,

I am also very interested in this topic.

gdebel, it would be great if you keep us up to date on how you get on. I agree with previous poster - polycarbonate would be a very suitable material for your test.

Thanks

Re: 3d printing of an optical lens

2013-06-25T23:38:46Z

This company claims to have recently printed lenses and frames.... very recently...

Luxexcel.com (check them out)

Which from what I understand is a pretty big deal (the lens part)... I happen to have a pretty big vested interest in seeing this technology take off in the future...

I own the domain names: LensPrinters.com and LensPrinting.com... plus a few others.

Anything else you can tell me about your own experiences would be great to hear.... how did your lens turn out?

Also... It was my understanding that a majority of lenses produced worldwide were comprised of polycarbonate "plastics" ... is this accurate?

Thanks in advance!

Re: 3d printing of an optical lens

2013-05-28T20:15:27Z

@314159 and pcm81
Thank you for your interest in this topic.
Actually the goal of the work is more about to demonstrate that a basic lens is printable today, and to extrapolate that tomorrow it will be possible to print high-quality lenses of different powers and shapes. I don't really need to build an apodised lens, I wan't to make people realize that it would be possible soon.

My problem is in fact: is a very basic lens printable today, without acetone smoothing or other complicated manipulations (sand softening would be acceptable)? There is two main problems: definition, and transparency.

By the way, did you heard about 3d-printing with acrylic? I could'nt find any website where I could order acrylic printing, but acrylic would be a good material for the king of lenses I try to make...

Re: 3d printing of an optical lens

2013-05-28T03:27:22Z

Couple thoughts from a physicist:
To make a good lens you need material with high index of refraction, this way you can make the lens thinner and have less losses. Plastics usually have low index of refraction, so your lens would be bigger than needs to be if made out of plastic instead of glass. Look up lens makers equation. The radii in your sketch depend on index of refraction. Also note that index of refraction for the same element varies from red to green to blue light. So not all components of light would focus in the same place. Compound lenses that mitigate this effect are called APO-corrected lenses. Most likely the plastic simple lens will be extremely not APO-corrected so basically difference of index of refraction from red to blue light will be very large. Also the crystal lattice faults in melted/printed plastic will be very high. This will result in a lens of very very very low quality. Look up on youtube "how lenses are made" there is a good video about cannon lenses.

Re: 3d printing of an optical lens

2013-05-25T17:35:55Z

For decent quality optics, you want something on the order of the wavelength of light (around 10^-7 meters.)

I had wondered whether a 100 micron print (10^-4 metres) could be acetone smoothed to get closer to an optical surface. I did once do a project about whether parabolic shapes could get close enough to the curves needed for things that could tolerate lower accuracy (like solar collectors)

To me, the commercial products still look very frosted, but I wonder about printing something that could hold the negative shape of an optical surface, like printing a telescope mirror, smoothing it, and then silvering it.

Re: 3d printing of an optical lens

2013-05-24T15:44:20Z

Hi Guillaume,

I have sent you a private message with additional information. Please check your PMs.

Re: 3d printing of an optical lens

2013-05-24T14:58:40Z

Waow. Charles_Xavier, Leghk, IanJohnson, you can't realize how grateful I am...
@Charles_Xavier: i'm really interested in contacting Pr Granter. Do you know him personnally?
The lens I try to realize will be used in a medical scientific work, maybe he will be interested...
Once again: thank you.

Re: 3d printing of an optical lens

2013-05-24T14:17:13Z

Hi,

I took a few minutes and modeled your lens for you:
http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:93321

I saved it as a .STEP file and a high-polygon .STL, as well as the native .SLDPRT. Feel free to use these models to send to potential 3D printing vendors during your search.

One thing I think you'll find is that because both surfaces of the lens are high-radius curves, FDM is a difficult print format for this part, since it doesn't handle such extreme overhangs without support. You could use support, but it will mar the surface of your print (i.e. the lens face). There are always post-processing techniques to smooth/polish this surface, though, so don't let that discourage you.

Depending on how flexible you are, I know that Professor Ganter at the Solheim Additive Manufacturing Laboratory at the University of Washington has been using a 3D printing technique to create glass parts. It's research based, but this seems like an excellent candidate for that.

Please let me know if you have any further questions!

Re: 3d printing of an optical lens

2013-05-23T22:33:34Z

Also check out http://christopherolah.files.wordpress. … sesohj.pdf for an older take on this.