Paper
6 April 2016 Additive manufacturing of glass for optical applications
Junjie Luo, Luke J. Gilbert, Douglas A. Bristow, Robert G. Landers, Jonathan T. Goldstein, Augustine M. Urbas, Edward C. Kinzel
Author Affiliations +
Proceedings Volume 9738, Laser 3D Manufacturing III; 97380Y (2016) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2218137
Event: SPIE LASE, 2016, San Francisco, California, United States
Abstract
Glasses including fused quartz have significant scientific and engineering applications including optics, communications, electronics, and hermetic seals. This paper investigates a filament fed process for Additive Manufacturing (AM) of fused quartz. Additive manufacturing has several potential benefits including increased design freedom, faster prototyping, and lower processing costs for small production volumes. However, current research in AM of glasses is limited and has focused on non-optical applications. Fused quartz is studied here because of its desirability for high-quality optics due to its high transmissivity and thermal stability. Fused quartz also has a higher working temperature than soda lime glass which poses a challenge for AM. In this work, fused quartz filaments are fed into a CO2 laser generated melt pool, smoothly depositing material onto the work piece. Single tracks are printed to explore the effects that different process parameters have on the morphology of printed fused quartz. A spectrometer is used to measure the thermal radiation incandescently emitted from the melt pool. Thin-walls are printed to study the effects of layer-to-layer height. Finally, a 3D fused quartz cube is printed using the newly acquired layer height and polished on each surface. The transmittance and index homogeneity of the polished cube are both measured. These results show that the filament fed process has the potential to print fused quartz with optical transparency and of index of refraction uniformity approaching bulk processed glass.
© (2016) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.
Junjie Luo, Luke J. Gilbert, Douglas A. Bristow, Robert G. Landers, Jonathan T. Goldstein, Augustine M. Urbas, and Edward C. Kinzel "Additive manufacturing of glass for optical applications", Proc. SPIE 9738, Laser 3D Manufacturing III, 97380Y (6 April 2016); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2218137
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CITATIONS
Cited by 18 scholarly publications.
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KEYWORDS
Fused quartz

Glasses

Additive manufacturing

Optics manufacturing

Printing

Quartz

Spectroscopy

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