Preliminary Study On Optical Fiber Preforms Fabrication Based On Three-dimensional Printing Technology

Fused Deposition Modeling is a rapid prototyping,increasing material manufacturing technology which fundamental principle is discrete and accumulation.It is one of three dimensional(3D)printing technology.The greatest advantage of 3D printing technology is directly used the models which were designed in the computer to print product without any moldings or mechanical processing.Thus,it greatly reduces the development cycle of researching,increases productivity and reduces production costs.Compared with other traditional production processes,it can makes almost any shaped and complex products.It has been widely used in the fields of medicine,the fabrication of artwork,architecture and other fields,but it is seldom used in the preparation of optical fiber preform.At present,there are many methods for fabricating polymer optical fiber preforms.For the optical fiber preforms with ordinary structure,extrusion method,interfacial-gel polymerization method and centrifugal method can be adopted.For the micro-structured optical fiber preforms,rods or tubes stacking method,drilling method,polymer casting method can be adopted.However,all these methods are usually time consuming and need a lot of material and expensive machines,have a lot of limitations.Compared with the traditional fabrication method of optical fiber preforms,the advantages of using Fused Deposition Modeling technology to fabricate optical fiber preform are no mechanical processing,time consumption,economic and environmental protection.In this dissertation,in order to make full use of these advantages of 3D printing technology,we combine 3D printing technology with optical fiber fabrication technology and put forward a new method of fabricating polymer optical fiber.Two polymer materials with high transmittance,good light conductivity and uniform refractive index distribution were respectively chosen as the core and cladding material of optical fiber preform.Compared with the properties of acrylonitrile butadiene styrene(ABS),polylactice acid(PLA),polycarbonate(PC)and other materials,ABS and PC material were selected as the cladding and core material of polymer optical fiber preform.In the process of fabricating the cladding,the printing layer height,the printing temperature and the printing speed of the printer are respectively adjusted to obtain the optimum printing conditions.The cores that matching with holes of cladding were obtained by polishing manually.Then,the cores were cleaned,dried,and inserted into the cladding to combine the hetero core optical fiber preforms.After fabricating optical fiber preforms,they were put into optical fiber drawing tower to pull the optical fiber.Then,the loss property of optical fibers were also studied.Finally,the propagation modes in the optical fiber are analyzed theoretically.The results of numerical simulation are obtained by COMSOL software.This work has a positive impact and great significance in the fields of optical fiber manufacturing,medical care and optical fiber sensing.