Refractive index manipulation of 3D printed lenses using ZrO2 nanoparticle doping

Tools

Butterworth, Charlie and Christopher, Jay and McConnell, Gail and Cunningham, Margaret and Walker, Dickon and Rooney, Liam and Bauer, Ralf; (2025) Refractive index manipulation of 3D printed lenses using ZrO2 nanoparticle doping. In: IEEE International conference on Optical MEMS and Nanophotonics (OMN) 2025. IEEE/LEOS International Conference on Optical MEMS . IEEE, THA. ISBN 9798331599225 (https://doi.org/10.1109/OMN65869.2025.11125996)

[thumbnail of Butterworth-etal-IEEE-OMN-2025-Refractive-index-manipulation-of-3D-printed-lenses-using-ZrO2-nanoparticle-doping]
Preview
 Text. Filename: Butterworth-etal-IEEE-OMN-2025-Refractive-index-manipulation-of-3D-printed-lenses-using-ZrO2-nanoparticle-doping.pdf
Accepted Author Manuscript
License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 logo
Download (990kB)| Preview

Abstract

We investigated the creation of optical elements with user-defined refractive index (RI) through low-cost 3D printing. The RI of the elements was adjusted by mixing ZrO2 nanoparticles with off-the-shelf consumer grade photopolymerization resins, enabling the potential for designing more advanced additively manufactured optical components with low-cost print approaches. Multiple resins were evaluated as base material for the nanoparticle embedding, with solubility and RI changes tested with the un-cured resins, leading to measured RI changes of up to 0.06. Plano-convex lenses of 25mm diameter and with 20mm focal length were created using 10% ZrO2 wt% loading and imaging performance was tested in a custom brightfield microscope.

ORCID iDs

Butterworth, Charlie ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0000-0380-0642, Christopher, Jay ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0009-0707-8947, McConnell, Gail ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7213-0686, Cunningham, Margaret ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6454-8671, Walker, Dickon ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0009-2071-2105, Rooney, Liam ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2237-501X and Bauer, Ralf ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7927-9435;
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)