Rapid prototyping of alumina-based microfluidic reactors

Abstract

Microfluidic reactors have become increasingly important for chemical synthesis. Alumina is an interesting material for the fabrication of microfluidic chemical reactors since it shows a high thermal and chemical stability, high mechanical strength and hardness as well as a relatively high thermal conductivity. However, microfluidic alumina reactors have so far been only barely structured using rapid prototyping approaches. Rapid prototyping however has gained great interest in microfluidics in recent years allowing the test of a wide variety of channel designs in an early stage of the development process. In this work, we demonstrate soft replication of photo-curable alumina nanocomposites for the fabrication of microfluidic reactors. Using this approach a microchannel with tens of micron resolution can easily be fabricated. The whole process takes less than 48 h.