Metrological characteristics of material measures depending on manufacturing parameters in direct laser writing and external stress factors

The accuracy of 3D additive manufacturing techniques such as direct laser writing (DLW) depends on a variety of parameters of the manufacturing process. This is why the robustness of the DLW process with changing manufacturing parameters is of particular interest. We investigate this robustness by systematically varying manufacturing parameters within a typical range and examine whether the structures change afterwards when they are exposed to stress factors like temperature and humidity. The metrological characteristics are determined by the relative change, just as well as the deviation between actual and nominal parameters of different surface topographies of various material measures. With the absolute values, it can be shown that a change of the manufacturing parameters in the DLW process does not result in a significant change of the metrological characteristics. The manufacturing process itself is therefore very robust. Even when a non-optimal manufacturing parameter set is chosen, the resulting samples feature stable topographic features. When the structures are exposed to external influences such as temperature and humidity, no significant relative change within the metrological characteristics can be observed.