Flexible metallic mold based precision compression molding for replication of micro-optical components onto non-planar surfaces

Replication of micro/nano-scale optical components onto non-planar substrates is considered technically challenging and excessively expensive via existing manufacturing approaches. A low-cost, large-volume and high-precision fabrication approach is thus highly desirable. In this paper, a novel precision compression molding approach that enables large-volume and high-resolution replication of micro/nano-scale optical features from planar to non-planar substrates is proposed. A micro-lens array is demonstrated to be transferred from a planar master mold to a non-planar substrate. In such process, a micro-lens array mold is initially fabricated by single-point diamond turning on a planar mold surface and then replicated by micro-injection molding. After that, the optical structures are transferred from micro-injected polymeric samples to a nickel foil by electro-plating, which is employed as a critical transition medium. To obtain sufficient flexibility with considerable strength, the thickness of the electro-plating mold is controlled to be around 75 μm, which is further integrated with precision molding tools to replicate micro/nano-scale optical features onto cylindrical substrates. Geometrical profile and surface roughness of the fabricated optical components in each processing step are characterized experimentally. The results indicate that the replication of the micro-lens array successfully demonstrates the process to transfer micro-optical components from planar surfaces to non-planar thermo-plastic polymeric substrates with high fidelity and optical-level surface quality. Compared with conventional precision compression molding, this novel proposed method in this research could achieve much higher flexibility and comparable fidelity with low cost on transferring optical structures from planar to non-planar surfaces. The application of this method might be widely extended to numerous replication methods, such as precision glass molding, roll-to-roll and roll-to-plane imprinting.