Fabrication of integrated optic fibre tip for micron CMMs touch trigger probe application

In the last decade the general miniaturisation of complex products has lead to an increased importance of high precision machining and assembly. Together with increasing precision of products, the need for highly accurate dimensional inspection increases. CMMs (Coordinate Measuring Machines), as a versatile and widespread dimensional metrology tool, can efficiently perform complex measurement with a resolution of about 0.1μm and a repeatability of about 0.3μm. The existing probes for CMMs tend to be very bulky and result in high probing forces for geometrical measurements of high accuracy on small parts. In this paper, an economical flexible method, which is based on optical fibre splicer, is proposed to fabricate an integrated micro scale silicon probe with spherical tip for micron CMMs. Based on Taguchi method, a combination of optimised process parameters has been obtained to control the fabrication conditions that will ensure the manufacturing of tips of a high and consistent quality. With proper control of the process parameters, an optic fibre probe tip with the diameter dimension in the range of 200 to 400μm is achieved and there is a great potential to fabricate a smaller tip with a diameter of 50-100μm in the future.