Abstract
The effects of silica nanoparticles on the properties of a commonly used Sylgard 184 polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) in microfluidics were systemically studied. Two kinds of silica nanoparticles, A380 fumed silica nanoparticles and MCM-41 mesoporous silica nanoparticles, were individually doped into PDMS, and the properties of PDMS with these two different silica nanoparticles were separately tested and compared. The thermal and mechanical stabilities of PDMS were significantly enhanced, and the swelling characteristics were also improved by doping these two kinds of nanoparticles. However, the transparency of PDMS was decreased due to the light scattering by nanoparticles. By contrast, PDMS/MCM-41 nanocomposites showed a lower coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) owing to the mesoporous structure of MCM-41 nanoparticles, while PDMS/A380 nanocomposites showed a larger elastic modulus and better transparency due to the smaller size of A380 nanoparticles. In addition, A380 and MCM-41 nanoparticles had the similar effects on the swelling characteristics of PDMS. The swelling ratio of PDMS in toluene was decreased to 0.68 when the concentration of nanoparticles was 10 wt %.
Highlights
Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) has been widely used in microfluidics due to its flexibility, biocompatibility, transparency, low cost and ease of fabrication [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
We systematically studied the effects of silica nanoparticles on the properties of the most commonly used PDMS in microfluidics, Sylgard 184 (Dow Corning Corporation, Midland, MI, USA) [3,5,10,11,20]
Strain-temperature curves of PDMS/silica nanocomposites were shown in Figure 3, and the coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) of PDMS/silica nanocomposites was calculated from the slope of the curves
Summary
Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) has been widely used in microfluidics due to its flexibility, biocompatibility, transparency, low cost and ease of fabrication [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. To improve the stabilities of PDMS, many kinds of nano materials, such as carbon nanotubes (CNTs) [13,14,15], silica nanoparticles [16,17,18], and graphene [19] have been doped into PDMS. Reported that the elastic modulus of PDMS was increased to 2.34 MPa by adding carbon nanotubes [13]. Camenzind et al reported that the elastic modulus of PDMS was increased to 3.18 MPa by admixing fumed silica nanoparticles [16]. The mechanical and thermal stabilities were effectively enhanced, and the swelling characteristics of PDMS were improved. In their studies, a hard PDMS (X-32-3095, Shin-Etsu Chemical Co., Ltd, Tokyo, Japan), which does not require a curing agent, was used. Two kinds of silica nanoparticles, fumed silica nanoparticles and mesoporous silica nanoparticles were doped and compared
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