A review of the techniques for the mold manufacturing of micro/nanostructures for precision glass molding

Micro/nanostructured components play an important role in micro-optics and optical engineering,tribology and surface engineering,and biological and biomedical engineering,among other fields.Precision glass molding technology is the most efficient method of manufacturing micro/nanostructured glass components,the premise of which is meld manufacturing with complementary micro/nanostructures.Numerous mold manufacturing methods have been developed to fabricate extremely small and high-quality micro/nanostructures to satisfy the demands of functional micro/nanostructured glass components for various applications.Moreover,the service performance of the mold should also be carefully considered.This paper reviews a variety of technologies for manufacturing micro/nanostructured molds.The authors begin with an introduction of the extreme requirements of mold materials.The following section provides a detailed survey of the existing micro/nanostructured mold manufacturing techniques and their corresponding mold materials,including nonmechanical and mechanical methods.This paper concludes with a detailed discussion of the authors recent research on nickel-phosphorus(Ni-P)mold manufacturing and its service performance.