The Research To Polymer Microlens And Arrays

Microlens array is one of the important micro-optical elements. Comparatively speaking, the glass microlens arrays have been studied for a relatively long time and developed very well. However, the cost of them is high and technique of manufacture is complicated. Therefore, the applications of them are limited to some extent. Recently, with the development of optical polymer materials, the manufacture of polymer micro-optical elements has become an interesting research subject, especially the optical gradient index polymer materials. Compared with inorganic materials, the polymers have the low cost and simple manufactured technology, so they will be applied broadly and have a big marketing potential.There are many manufactured techniques such as: resist-melting method, gray-scale mask, hot bossing method, sol-gel method and photo-induced cross-linking polymerization etc. Apart from these methods mentioned above, there is another new method named micro-jet printing, which derives from ink-jet printing. In this article this method of fabrication of microlens arrays is introduced. In this research a Micro-Fab equipment has been designed, whose movement error is within 1μm, and a fabrication technology suitable for this method also has been gotten through hundreds of experiments. The contents mainly include the basic theory of micro-jet printing method, the analysis of microlens' optical speciality, the research of microlens arrays and testing of combination property.The microlens arrays fabricated with the micro-jet printing method have very good optical property. The transmittance, the surface profile, the dimensional uniformity, focal length, wave aberration, surface roughness of the microlens have been measured and got good results: the transmittance of microlens is above 90% for...