Abstract
Polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA) is one of the most important thermoplastic materials and is a widely used material in microfluidics. However, PMMA is usually structured using industrial scale replication processes, such as hot embossing or injection molding, not compatible with rapid prototyping. In this work, we demonstrate that microfluidic chips made from PMMA can be 3D printed using fused deposition modeling (FDM). We demonstrate that using FDM microfluidic chips with a minimum channel cross-section of ~300 µm can be printed and a variety of different channel geometries and mixer structures are shown. The optical transparency of the chips is shown to be significantly enhanced by printing onto commercial PMMA substrates. The use of such commercial PMMA substrates also enables the integration of PMMA microstructures into the printed chips, by first generating a microstructure on the PMMA substrates, and subsequently printing the PMMA chip around the microstructure. We further demonstrate that protein patterns can be generated within previously printed microfluidic chips by employing a method of photobleaching. The FDM printing of microfluidic chips in PMMA allows the use of one of microfluidics’ most used industrial materials on the laboratory scale and thus significantly simplifies the transfer from results gained in the lab to an industrial product.
Highlights
Three-dimensional (3D) printing has gained great importance for rapid prototyping of microfluidic devices in the past decade, since it allows the fabrication of microfluidic chips on the laboratory scale, with the possibility to test a great variety of different chip designs early on in the development process [1,2,3,4]
To print PMMA microfluidic chips with an optical transparency in the region of interest, we studied two different printing strategies: (1) standard printing procedure with direct printing on the print bed and (2) printing onto a commercial PMMA substrate
In this work, we demonstrated that microfluidic PMMA chips can be fabricated down to channel diameters of 300 μm using a benchtop fused deposition modeling (FDM) machine
Summary
Three-dimensional (3D) printing has gained great importance for rapid prototyping of microfluidic devices in the past decade, since it allows the fabrication of microfluidic chips on the laboratory scale, with the possibility to test a great variety of different chip designs early on in the development process [1,2,3,4]. On the laboratory scale these 3D printed microfluidic devices have been used in a great variety of applications: for mixers, droplet or gradient generators or active components like valves or pumps [9,10,11,12]. One major issue for most rapid prototyping methods in microfluidics, including 3D printing, is the conversion of a laboratory prototype to an industrial scale product [13]. One option to solve this problem is the use of 3D printing methods, which can process industrially relevant thermoplastic polymers already on the laboratory scale. FDM printing has been used to fabricate simple channel geometries with sub-100 μm [17]
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