Tool based manufacturing processes like injection moulding allow fast and high-quality mass-market production, but for optical polymer components the production of the necessary tools is time-consuming and expensive. In this paper a process to fabricate metal-inserts for tool based manufacturing with smooth surfaces via a casting and replication process from fused silica templates is presented. Bronze, brass and cobalt-chromium could be successfully replicated from shaped fused silica replications achieving a surface roughnesses of R_q 8 nm and microstructures in the range of 5 µm. Injection moulding was successfully performed, using a commercially available injection moulding system, with thousands of replicas generated from the same tool. In addition, three-dimensional bodies in metal could be realised with 3D-Printing of fused silica casting moulds. This work thus represents an approach to high-quality moulding tools via a scalable facile and cost-effective route surpassing the currently employed cost-, labour- and equipment-intensive machining techniques.

注塑成型等基于工具的制造工艺可实现快速、高质量的大规模生产，但对于光学聚合物元件而言，必要工具的生产既耗时又昂贵。在本文中，介绍了一种通过铸造和复制工艺从熔融石英模板制造具有光滑表面的基于工具的金属嵌件的制造工艺。青铜、黄铜和钴铬合金可以成功地从成形的熔融石英复制品中复制出来，达到 R _{q的表面粗糙度}8 nm 和 5 µm 范围内的微结构。使用市售的注塑系统成功地进行了注塑，使用同一工具生成了数千个复制品。此外，金属中的三维物体可以通过熔融石英铸造模具的 3D 打印来实现。因此，这项工作代表了一种通过可扩展的简便且具有成本效益的途径获得高质量成型工具的方法，该途径超越了目前采用的成本、劳动力和设备密集型加工技术。