Compensation of the position errors of optical elements by adapting their additively manufactured mounting structure

Additive Manufacturing (AM) is often not considered as a manufacturing technique for mounting structures, because the assembly of optical systems usually requires small manufacturing tolerances, that are currently hard to achieve. But in comparison to conventional manufacturing techniques, AM has the advantage of being able to easily individualize each manufactured structure. Hence, mounting structures can be designed and adapted such, that the measured inner decentrations of conventionally manufactured optical elements to be mounted can be compensated. With this, the error budget contributions from optical elements can be minimized, either to relax their or their mounting structure tolerances or to reduce the overall system tolerance. To prove this concept, we designed an optical system to quantify small displacements of optical elements within a simple to replace additive manufactured mounting structure. From analysing the recorded intensity distribution, one can accurately quantify the lateral decentration of one of the optical elements in respect to the other one. The first experimental results show, that it is feasible to control and adjust the decentration of an optical element mounted in an additively manufactured structure.