Browsing by Subject "Polishing"

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Open Access
CO2 laser polishing of conical shaped optical fiber deflectors
(Springer Verlag, 2017-06) Şimşek, E. U.; Şimşek, B.; Ortaç, B.
A novel method for polishing conical shaped optical fiber deflectors by modulated CO2 laser exposure is reported. The conical shaped fiber deflector geometry was first formed with rough mechanical polishing, then it was exposed to modulated CO2 laser operating with wavelength at 10.6 µm to achieve fine polish surfaces. The motivation of this work is to demonstrate that the modulated CO2 laser exposure approach allows a fiber surface roughness at a nanometer scale without modifying the conical shape of the fiber deflector. The average surface roughness of mechanically polished fiber deflectors with 30 and 9 µm lapping films was smoothed down to 20.4 and 4.07 nm, respectively, after CO2 laser polishing process. By combining mechanical and laser polishing techniques, fabrication of conical shaped optical fiber deflectors takes less time and it becomes laborer independent and easy to apply. © 2017, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.
Open Access
CO2 laser polishing of microfluidic channels fabricated by femtosecond laser assisted carving
(Institute of Physics Publishing, 2016-10) Serhatlioglu, M.; Ortaç, B.; Elbuken, C.; Bıyıklı, Necmi; Solmaz, M. E.
In this study, we investigate the effects of CO2 laser polishing on microscopic structures fabricated by femtosecond laser assisted carving (FLAC). FLAC is the peripheral laser irradiation of 2.5D structures suitable for low repetition rate lasers and is first used to define the microwell structures in fused silica followed by chemical etching. Subsequently, the bottom surface of patterned microwells is irradiated with a pulsed CO2 laser. The surfaces were characterized using an atomic force microscope (AFM) and scanning electron microscope (SEM) in terms of roughness and high quality optical imaging before and after the CO2 laser treatment. The AFM measurements show that the surface roughness improves more than threefold after CO2 laser polishing, which promises good channel quality for applications that require optical imaging. In order to demonstrate the ability of this method to produce low surface roughness systems, we have fabricated a microfluidic channel. The channel is filled with polystyrene bead-laden fluid and imaged with transmission mode microscopy. The high quality optical images prove CO2 laser processing as a practical method to reduce the surface roughness of microfluidic channels fabricated by femtosecond laser irradiation. We further compared the traditional and laser-based glass micromachining approaches, which includes FLAC followed by the CO2 polishing technique.