A Study of Two-Stage Micro Injection Compression Molding Process for Diffractive Optical Lens

摘要

This research aimed to develop a novel two-stage micro injection compression molding (μ-ICM) process for fabrication of plastic diffractive optic elements (DOE). The DOE was designed with the spherical coefficients and the Fresnel lens. A piezo actuator was installed inside the mold plate for activating the mold insert for the second compression motion for micro ICM of the DOE lens. The first experiment proceeded to find the operation window of Fresnel lens and then compare the product weight of flat spherical lens by injection molding (IM), injection compression molding (ICM) and μ-ICM. The second experiment was to investigate the effectiveness of micro compression activated by the piezo actuator by the transfer ratio of grooves (TRG) of the DOE lens with spherical lens and Fresnel lens. Results showed that the μ-ICM of the DOE can obtain the highest TRG than that of IM and conventional ICM processes. Therefore, results of this research can be explored to related aspheric optical elements with micro features, such as fine lens used in the zoom lens of camera.