Ultra-low-cost fabrication of polymer-based microfluidic devices with diode laser ablation
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Ultra-low-cost fabrication of polymer-based microfluidic devices with diode laser ablation Kexin Gao 1 & Jingji Liu 1 & Yiqiang Fan 1,2
&
Yajun Zhang 1
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract In this work, a diode laser ablation approach was used for the fabrication of PMMA-based microfluidic devices. Compared with the conventional CO2 or femtosecond laser fabrication method, the proposed laser ablation method based on diode laser significantly lowered the cost in the fabrication of polymer-based microfluidic devices with comparable resolution and surface quality. PMMA substrate was used for the laser ablation process, due to the transparency of PMMA in the diode laser’s working wavelength, a layer of Kraft tape was applied on the surface of PMMA for the absorption of laser energy, and microchannels were then achieved on the surface of PMMA with the proposed low-cost diode laser system. The comparison between the proposed method and the CO2 laser ablation method was also conducted in this study. The profile of the fabricated microchannels was carefully characterized, several microfluidic devices were also fabricated for the demonstration of the proposed fabrication method using a diode laser. Keywords Microfluidics . Low-cost . PMMA . Diode laser
1 Introduction Microfluidic devices have been widely used for the control, process and analyze fluids in micro-scale for biological (Sia and Whitesides 2003; Xia et al. 2016) and chemical (Abendroth et al. 2015; DeMello 2006) applications. The early fabrication techniques for microfluidics were inherited from the MEMS field, the commonly used materials are glass (Min et al. 2006; Othman et al. 2015) and silicon (Harris et al. 2003). Recently, polymers which offer the advantage of low weight, low cost, easy to process, have come up as a costeffective solution to many microfluidic devices. Fabrication of microfluidic devices has been fabricated using injection molding (Su et al. 2004), hot embossing (Becker and Heim 2000), soft lithography (Vozzi et al. 2003), and X-ray lithography (Khumpuang et al. 2006). However, these methods are time-consuming and require sophisticated equipment. Moreover, lithography technology often requires the use of a
* Yiqiang Fan [email protected] 1
School of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Beijing University of Chemical Technology, Beijing 100029, China
2
School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
series of fabrication procedures in the cleanroom environment, which further raise the cost of the fabrication process. To find an direct, controllable and low-costa fabrication process for polymer-based microfluidics, more and more researchers have conducted various research in the area of processing microfluidic chips using laser ablation. Currently, the most commonly used laser systems are the CO2 laser and the femtosecond laser. Shiashi Praksas and Subrata Kumar (Prakash and Kumar 2015) used CO2 laser (10.6 μm) to create microchannels on transp
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