Flexible fabrication of biomimetic compound eye array via two-step thermal reflow of simply pre-modeled hierarchic microstructures

•A flexible fabrication method for the BCE array is proposed.•The edge bulge effect of spherical microlens is studied in the thermal reflow.•An upside-down thermal reflow strategy is proposed to obtain the ommatidia.•Hierarchic microstructures are fabricated by a single-scan strategy based on DMD.

A flexible fabrication method for the biomimetic compound eye (BCE) array is proposed. In this method, a triple-layer sandwich-like coating configuration was introduced, and the required hierarchic microstructures are formed with a simple single-scan exposure in maskless digital lithography. Taking advantage of the difference of glass transition point (Tg) between photoresists of each layer, the pre-formed hierarchic microstructures are in turn reflowed to the curved substrate and the BCE ommatidia in a two-step thermal reflow process. To avoid affecting the spherical substrate formed in the first thermal reflow, a non-contact strategy was proposed in the second reflow process. The measurement results were in good agreement with the designed BCE profiles. Results also showed that the fabricated BCE had good performances in optical test. The presented method is flexible, convenient, low-cost and can easily adapt to the fabrications of other optical elements with hierarchic microstructures.