3D printing mesoscale optical components with a low-cost resin printer integrated with a fiber-optic taper

Design flexibility, ease of use, and reduced wastage have made additive manufacturing well suited for producing functional prints in many fields including optics. As surface quality is compromised in many cases, postprocessing or better fabrication techniques are required. Advanced fabrication techniques such as two-photon polymerization lithography (TPL) have enabled nano- and microscale fabrications with high surface quality, while postprocessing improves the surface quality of macroscale structures. However, fabricating mesoscale optical components is still challenging as these structures require a lot of time to fabricate with TPL and postprocessing capabilities are limited at these dimensions. Low-cost resin printers are now equipped with 4K resolution screens claiming pixel sizes of ∼35 μm. Still, improvements in print resolution and surface smoothness could be obtained with a simple modification to the setup. Here, we study the impact of introducing a fiber-optic taper to demagnify the images from the screen of a low-cost hobbyist grade resin printer for mesoscale (100 μm to 5 mm) fabrication, achieving a resolution of ∼15 μm half-pitch. We compared normal and modified printing techniques, with gains in resolution used to fabricate a working Fresnel lens.