Issue 9/2017 - Liquid glass helps 3D printing technical difficulties

On
April 18, a materials science research report published in the British journal Nature said that German scientists used standard 3D printing technology to create ultra-complex, high-precision and high-quality glass shapes, such as tiny kink-like crackers or castles
.
This means that 3D printing technology can now be used to produce structures with high optical properties, which can be widely used to design complex lenses and filters
.

In the past few years, the cost of 3D printing technology has become lower and lower, and the range of suitable materials has been larger
.
However, if you want to use standard 3D printing technology to create high-quality glass structures that can be used in precision optical devices, it is still a big problem
.

This time, Basten Rapp, a researcher at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, and his colleagues have invented a new technology to overcome this problem by using free-flowing quartz nanocomposites (known as "liquid glass") in standard 3D printers to create complex shapes, which are then thermally processed to form fused silica glass structures
with high optical properties.
These structures are smooth and transparent, and the detail features can be as small as tens of microns
.

The technology does not only provide exquisite crafts, but also creates surfaces with sufficient transparency and reflectivity for a large number of
optical devices.