Novel method for manufacturing optical fiber: extrusion and drawing of microstructured polymer optical fibers from a 3D printer

Microstructured polymer optical fibers (MPOFs) have long attracted great interest due to their wide range of applications in biological and chemical sensing. In this manuscript, we demonstrate a novel technique of manufacturing MPOF via a single-step procedure by means of a 3D printer. A suspended-core polymer optical fiber has been extruded and directly drawn from a micro-structured 3D printer nozzle by using an acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) polymer. Near-field imaging at the fiber facet performed at the wavelength λ~1550 nm clearly indicates guidance in the fiber core. The propagation loss has been experimentally demonstrated to be better than α = 1.1 dB/cm. This work points toward direct MPOFs manufacturing of varieties of materials and structures of optical fibers from 3D printers using a single manufacturing step.