Refractive Index Manipulation of 3D Printed Lenses using ZrO₂ Nanoparticle Doping

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 ZrO<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</inf> 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% ZrO<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</inf> wt% loading and imaging performance was tested in a custom brightfield microscope.