Contact Optical Fiber Profilometer

Additive manufacture has opened up a series of new tools to fabricate all sort of objects for different application purposes, for everyday use or for highly specialize components for research or scientific purposes. However, the final quality of the surface objects is far from that obtained with conventional manufacture methods. In this work, we propose a simple and low-cost optical fiber profilometer for measuring the surface of 3D-printed objects. The scanning section of the profilometer consists of a stylus attached to one side of a metal beam that hold a hetero-core fiber in the other side. When the stylus scans the surface, it moves in forward and backward direction, tracking the shape of the profile, inducing curvature to the beam and therefore modifying the multimode interference conditions in the hetero-core fiber. The changes of the transmitted intensity allowed us to reconstruct with good precision the surface of the scanned object.