Novel Multiple Materials Additive Manufacturing Instrument for New Generation of Optical fibre Fabrication

在这份提案中，我们将设计、制造和使用一种新型的多材料添加剂制造(MMAM)设备，使我们能够在二氧化硅和其他主体玻璃材料中制造光纤预制件(包括传统和微结构纤维几何形状)。在现有的低损耗光纤预制棒制备方法中，无论是基于常规固体折射率导引光纤的化学气相沉积技术，还是基于微结构光纤的叠加拉伸工艺，都很难实现对三维成分的控制。我们提出的MMAM可以用于生产复杂的预制件，否则这是非常困难或耗时的，或者目前用现有的制造技术是不可能实现的。这将开启在二氧化硅和其他玻璃中制造新型纤维结构的机会，应用范围广泛，从电信、传感、光纤实验室、超材料纤维到高功率激光，随后我们有望在未来获得显著的经济增长。

In this proposal we will design, fabricate and employ a novel multiple materials additive manufacturing (MMAM) equipmentto enable us to make optical fibre preforms (both in conventional and microstructured fibre geometries) in silica and otherhost glass materials. In existing low-loss fibre preform fabrication methods, based on either chemical vapour depositiontechnique for conventional solid index guiding fibres or 'stack and draw' process for micro-structured fibre, it is very difficultto control composition in 3D. Our proposed MMAM can be utilised to produce complex preforms, which is otherwise toodifficult or time consuming or currently impossible to achieve by the existing fabrication techniques. This will open up aroute to manufacture novel fibre structures in silica and other glasses for a wide range of applications, covering fromtelecommunications, sensing, lab-in-a-fibre, metamaterial fibre, to high-power laser, and subsequently we are expected togain significant economic growth in the future.