Replicative manufacturing of metal moulds for low surface roughness polymer replication
Sebastian Kluck, Leonhard Hambitzer, Manuel Luitz, Markus Mader, Mario Sanjaya, Andreas Balster, Marcel Milich, Christian Greiner, Frederik Kotz, Bastian E. Rapp
Abstract
Abstract Tool based manufacturing processes like injection moulding allow fast and high-quality mass-market production, but for optical polymer components the production of the necessary tools is time-consuming and expensive. In this paper a process to fabricate metal-inserts for tool based manufacturing with smooth surfaces via a casting and replication process from fused silica templates is presented. Bronze, brass and cobalt-chromium could be successfully replicated from shaped fused silica replications achieving a surface roughnesses of R q 8 nm and microstructures in the range of 5 µm. Injection moulding was successfully performed, using a commercially available injection moulding system, with thousands of replicas generated from the same tool. In addition, three-dimensional bodies in metal could be realised with 3D-Printing of fused silica casting moulds. This work thus represents an approach to high-quality moulding tools via a scalable facile and cost-effective route surpassing the currently employed cost-, labour- and equipment-intensive machining techniques.