Wave optical model for tomographic volumetric additive manufacturing

Tomographic Volumetric Additive Manufacturing (TVAM) allows printing of mesoscopic objects within seconds or minutes. Tomographic patterns are illuminated onto a rotating glass vial which contains a photosensitive resin. Current pattern optimization is based on a ray optical assumption which ultimately leads to limited resolution around 20μm and varying throughout the volume of the 3D object. In this work, we introduce a rigorous wave-based optical amplitude optimization scheme for TVAM which shows that high-resolution printing is theoretically possible over the full volume. The wave optical optimization approach is based on an efficient angular spectrum method of plane waves with custom written memory efficient gradients and allows for optimization of realistic volumes for TVAM such as (100μm)^3 or (10mm)^3 with 550^3 voxels and 600 angles. Our simulations show that ray-optics start to produce artifacts when the desired features are 20μm and below and more importantly, the amplitude modulated TVAM can reach micrometer features when optimizing the patterns using a full wave model.