Comparsion of FLM and SLA Processing Technologies Towards Manufacturing of Optical Waveguides for Communicationi and Sensing Applications

Light guiding structures, like optical waveguides or fibers, take an important role in several industries, e.g. communication, sensing, illumination or medical applications. For the latter, it could be very interesting to have the possibility to manufacture problem-adapted structureswith a mechanicalfunctionality andwith additional embedded optical or electrical sensor functionalities.Modern additive manufacturing (AM) technologies like Stereolithography (SLA) or Fused Layer Modeling (FLM) may provide these opportunities.This paper is aimedto figure out the light guiding opportunities of both technologies. For this different kind of structures are built by FLM and SLA. To compare both manufacturing technologies, the layout of each structure is identical for both technologies. After manufacturing, the transmission and the attenuation of the guided light of these structures areanalyzed by measurement.Then the measurement results of the different technologies are compared with each other.