Direct Fabrication of Microstructured Surfaces by Additive Manufacturing

Different fabrication methods can be applied for micro fabrication, all characterized by their specific processing time and cost. However, by using the additive manufacturing (AM) technologies for direct micro manufacturing of complex micro geometries the average production time and cost can be drastically reduced.

This study investigates an AM-based fabrication method for the production of microstructure surfaces with different feature sizes (50-150 μm). The experiments presented in this work have been carried out in a specifically designed vat photopolymerization AM machine suitable for precision printing developed, built and validated at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU).

The AM method was evaluated in terms the capability of the system to produce micro pillars and holes array in different sizes and with increasing geometrical complexity.