Research project

Novel Multiple Materials Additive

Lead researchers:

Professor Jayanta Sahu
Research funder:

EPSRC
Status:

Not active

Project overview

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