Two-Photon Polymerization lithography for three-dimensional micro polymer parts manufacturing evaluation

Two-photon polymerization (2PP) technique is one of the common techniques to realize the fabrication of high-quality 3D microstructures. The combination between the laser power, the printing strategy, and the printed feature size are not completely assessed. This study characterizes the additive manufacturing processes by Direct Laser Writing (DLW) for fabrication of 3D microstructures. The printing samples were selected from a certified calibrated set with different sizes consisting of five boxes ranging from 8 μm to 200 μm. The laser power was selected as a variable parameter in order to find out the effect of various powers in printing size and strategy. Six different powers were selected from 0.6 mW to 1.6 mW for each set of the structure. The results show the importance of choosing the right power value, otherwise the structures would be burned for too high power or not completely polymerised for too low one. In addition, they show the importance of a good scaffolding, especially for bigger structures where the geometry can be distorted.