Additive Manufacturing – Design and Fabrication of a Fisheye Lens

The purpose of this talk is to outline the possibility of producing a complete optical system based on 3D printing. Hereby the complete optical system contains the optical parts and the mechanical parts that will be combined and printed out in one run. We designed and printed a fisheye lens based on a four lens design. For designing the optical parts the software Zemax was used. The CAD software PCT Creo was applied in order to design the mounting of the system, which should be stackable. After printing the lenses with the Keyence Agilista 3100W, the individual lenses were polished with a polishing machine using negative polishing heads. The printing process as well as the use of support material, which is needed for the printing of overhanging structures, are affecting the roughness of the surfaces. For the printed surfaces a roughness Ra of about 715 nm was measured. After polishing, the final roughness Ra was reduced to about 38 nm. We validated our optical lens system using simulated data and experimental resolution measurements of a 1951 USAF resolution test chart.