The new achievement builds on earlier work in which the researchers used a polymer material to demonstrate the first fiber drawn from a 3-D printed preform. Translating polymer 3-D printing to glass "This could, for example, broaden the applications of fiber optic sensors, which far outperform electronic equivalents in terms of longevity, calibration and maintenance but haven't been widely deployed due to their expensive fabrication." "Additive manufacturing approaches such as 3-D printing are well suited to change the entire approach to fiber design and purpose," said Canning.Ī draw tower (left) was employed to make the final optical fiber (right). This removes one of the greatest limitations in fiber design and greatly cuts the cost of fiber manufacturing."Ĭanning's group has, in collaboration with Gang-Ding Peng's research team at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, report the creation of what they are calling “the first silica glass fibers drawn from 3-D printed preforms.” "With additive manufacturing, there's no need for the fiber geometry to be centered. "Making silica optical fiber involves the labor-intensive process of spinning tubes on a lathe, which requires the fiber's core or cores to be precisely centered," said John Canning who led the research team from the University of Technology in Sydney. The partnership from the University of Technology in Sydney and the University of New South Wales says that the new fabrication method “could not only simplify production of these fibers but also enable designs and applications that have not been possible before.” The work was first reported in Optics Letters (paywall). "This is something that has never been tried before and we are excited about starting this project.3D printing method "direct-light projection" used to make silica fiber preforms.Researchers at two Australia universities have collaborated to develop a way to 3-D print a preform that can be drawn into silica glass optical fibers, for new types of telecommunications networks and other purposes. "We hope our work will open up a route to manufacture novel fibre structures in silica and other glasses for a wide range of applications, covering telecommunications, sensing, lab-in-a-fibre, metamaterial fibre, and high-power lasers," added Professor Sahu. Unsurprisingly, fabricating the preform is one of the most challenging stages of optical fiber manufacturing and this new process has the potential to revolutionize multiple industries that use fiber optics - particularly telecom and datacom industries. "Our proposed process can be utilised to produce complex preforms, which are otherwise too difficult, too time-consuming or currently impossible to be achieved by existing fabrication techniques." "We will design, fabricate and employ novel Multiple Materials Additive Manufacturing (MMAM) equipment to enable us to make optical fibre preforms (both in conventional and microstructured fibre geometries) in silica and other host glass materials," says Professor Sahu. This new way of producing the fibers not only has the potential to dramatically change how existing fibers are produced, but also pave the way for more complex optical fiber structures that are able to host a variety of applications for industries ranging from telecommunications and aerospace to biotechnologies and more. The new fabrication technique, which is currently being developed by Professor Jayanta Sahu along with his colleagues from the University of Southampton's Zepler Institute and co-investigator Dr Shoufeng Yang from the Faculty of Engineering and Environment, will ultimately allow engineers to manufacture new preform designs that are significantly more complex than existing fibers. Using their new technique however, the University of Southampton researchers have been able to form complex fibre structures by layering ultra-pure glass powder and gradually building up a shape to create a preform. Although this method produces consistent results, the inability to control the shape and composition of a fiber limits the degree of flexibility that engineers can use to design a fiber’s function. As we continue to see more developments being made towards advancing additive manufacturing technologies, we’re naturally also starting to see what those new developments are capable of producing.Īmong others, researchers at the University of Southampton have been exploring ways of using additive manufacturing to produce optical fibers.Ĭurrently, the majority of existing fibers are made using a labor intensive “stack and draw” process that involves stacking small glass capillaries by hand to create a preform, which is a piece of glass from which an optical fiber is drawn.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |