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Mask-free laser lithography for rapid and low-cost microfluidic device fabrication
journal contribution
posted on 2019-02-11, 14:53 authored by Tatiana Trantidou, Mark S. Friddin, Kin B. Gan, Luyao Han, Guido Bolognesi, Nicholas J. Brooks, Oscar CesCopyright © 2018 American Chemical Society. Microfluidics has become recognized as a powerful platform technology associated with a constantly increasing array of applications across the life sciences. This surge of interest over recent years has led to an increased demand for microfluidic chips, resulting in more time being spent in the cleanroom fabricating devices using soft lithography - a slow and expensive process that requires extensive materials, training and significant engineering resources. This bottleneck limits platform complexity as a byproduct of lengthy delays between device iterations and affects the time spent developing the final application. To address this problem, we report a new, rapid, and economical approach to microfluidic device fabrication using dry resist films to laminate laser cut sheets of acrylic. We term our method laser lithography and show that our technique can be used to engineer 200 μm width channels for assembling droplet generators capable of generating monodisperse water droplets in oil and micromixers designed to sustain chemical reactions. Our devices offer high transparency, negligible device to device variation, and low X-ray background scattering, demonstrating their suitability for real-time X-ray-based characterization applications. Our approach also requires minimal materials and apparatus, is cleanroom free, and at a cost of around $1.00 per chip could significantly democratize device fabrication, thereby increasing the interdisciplinary accessibility of microfluidics.
Funding
This work was supported by the EPSRC via grants EP/J017566/1 and EP/K038648/1.
History
School
- Aeronautical, Automotive, Chemical and Materials Engineering
Department
- Chemical Engineering
Published in
Analytical ChemistryVolume
90Issue
23Pages
13915 - 13921Citation
TRANTIDOU, T. ... et al., 2018. Mask-free laser lithography for rapid and low-cost microfluidic device fabrication. Analytical Chemistry, 90(23), pp. 13915 - 13921.Publisher
© American Chemical SocietyVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This document is the Accepted Manuscript version of a Published Work that appeared in final form in Analytical Chemistry, copyright © American Chemical Society after peer review and technical editing by the publisher. To access the final edited and published work see https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.analchem.8b03169.Acceptance date
2018-11-05Publication date
2018ISSN
0003-2700eISSN
1520-6882Publisher version
Language
- en