Reliability Testing of 3D-Printed Electromechanical Scanning Devices

Recent advances in the field of stereolithography based manufacturing, have led to a number of 3D-printed sensor and actuator devices, as a cost-effective and low fabrication complexity alternative to micro-electro-mechanical counterparts. Yet the reliability of such 3D-printed dynamic structures have yet to be explored. Here we perform reliability tests and analysis of a selected 3D-printed actuator, namely an electromechanical scanner. The scanner is targeted towards scanning incoming light onto the target, which is particularly useful for barcoding, display, and opto-medical tissue imaging applications. We monitor the deviations in the fundamental mechanical resonance, scan-line, and the quality factor on a number of scanners having different device thicknesses, for a total duration of 5 days (corresponding to 20–80 million cycles, depending on the device operating frequency). A total of 9 scanning devices, having 10 mm × 10 mm die size were tested, with a highlight on device-device variability, as well as the effect of device thickness itself. An average standard deviation of < ~%10 (with respect to the mean) was observed for all tested parameters among scanners of the same type (an indicator device to device variability), while an average standard deviation of less than about 10 percent (with respect to the mean) was observed for all parameters for the duration of the entire test (as an indicator of device reliability), for a total optical scan angle of 5 degrees.