29/4/2014 Make Your Own Droplet Microscope Lens for a Penny | I Fucking Love Science

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TECHNOLOGY
Make Your Own Droplet Microscope Lens for a
Penny
April 29, 2014 | by Janet Fang
photo credit: A set of droplet lenses on a microscope coverslip with ANUs Steve Lee / Stuart Hay, ANU
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Clear liquid droplets can bend light, acting like a lens. By exploiting this well-known
phenomenon, scientists have devised a cheap and simple way to turn a smartphone into a
high-resolution microscope. The high-powered lenses cost less than a cent apiece to make,
and all you need is a cover slip or glass slide, some common polymer, and an oven. The
method would be immensely helpful for diagnosing medical conditions in remote areas and
developing countries.

Conventional lenses are usually made in one of two ways. You can grind and polish a flat
disk of glass into a particular curved shape, or you can pour gel into molds. These new
lentil-sized lenses simply retain the natural shape of liquid droplets. They're made of a gel-
like silicon polymer called polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) -- the same unbreakable, scratch-
free stuff used for contact lenses.

And it really sounds quite simple to
make. We put a droplet of polymer onto
a microscope cover slip and then invert
it. Then we let gravity do the work, to pull
it into the perfect curvature, study
author Steve Lee from Australia National
University explains in a news release.

By adding small amounts of fluid to the droplet successively after baking the base drop,
they managed to reach a (surprisingly high) magnifying power of 160 times with an imaging
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resolution of four micrometers. They
varied the focal lengths by letting the
drop hang and then curing (or
hardening) them further in the oven.

"What I did was to systematically fine-
tune the curvature that's formed by a
simple droplet with the help of gravity,
and without any molds," Lee explains. No
complicated machinery needed. Heres
the step-by-step easy-bake recipe:

1. Drop a small amount of PDMS onto the slide.
2. Bake at 70 degrees Celsius to harden it and create a base.
3. Afterwards, drop another dollop of PDMS onto the base and flip the slide over.
4. Watch as gravity pulls the new droplet down into a parabolic shape.
5. Bake the droplet again to solidify the lens.
6. Add more drops as needed to hone the lens shape and enhance the imaging
quality of the lens.

The whole lens was only a few millimeters thick and just over a centimeter in diameter. The
team then designed a lightweight 3D-printable frame to hold the lens, along with a couple
mini LEDs and a coin battery for watches. The attachment turns a smartphone camera into
a dermascope to diagnose skin diseases like melanoma. Dermascopes can cost $500; this
new prototype dermascope add-on comes to about $2. You can check out this comparison
of the magnified images.


The new dermascope could be commercially available in just a few months, according to
Lee. With a different app, a similar tool can help farmers identify pests in the field. And to
think, the first droplet lens was made by accident. Serendipitous.

The work was published in the Optical Societys Biomedical Optics Express this week.

[Via ANU, Optical Society]

Images: Stuart Hay, ANU

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