Ferrofluid-molding method for polymeric microlens arrays fabrication

Abstract

This study proposes a method named as ferrofluid-molding method for polymer microlens array fabrication. In this method, the master of the mother mold for microlens molding is an array of ferrofluid droplets. We generated droplet arrays by inducing the droplet's magnetic hydrodynamic instability under different magnetic fields, and used the field-dependent droplet dimensions to fabricate numerous mold cavities. By this we could fabricate arrays of microlens with different bottom area, height, radius of curvature, and focal length. From our analysis, all the fabricated microlens arrays possessed good uniformity, and the largest numerical aperture of our microlens array was found as 0.54. In addition, we also designed a light uniformity experiment to demonstrate a potential application of our microlens arrays. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.