3D printed microfluidics and microelectronics

Sochol, Ryan D.; Sweet, Eric; Glick, Casey C.; Wu, Sung-Yueh; Yang, Chen; Restaino, Michael; Liu, Lin

doi:10.1016/j.mee.2017.12.010

Cited by 187 publications

(123 citation statements)

References 199 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

120

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…However, fabrication of freeform 3D hollow microchannels in fused silica is still difficult for current 2D fabrication techniques in terms of complex and tedious fabrication procedures, additional costs for aligning, stacking, and bonding steps. [27] Meanwhile, 3D printing of glass materials emerging in recent years brings some new opportunities for scalable fabrication of freeform glass structures by either additive manufacturing strategies [28][29][30][31][32][33] or laser subtractive processing methods. [15][16][17][18][19][20] A suspended hollow microchannel structure with a 3D controllable configuration can be fabricated in a way of either laser-assisted selective wet etching [21][22][23] or liquid-assisted laser ablation.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Freeform Microfluidic Networks Encapsulated in Laser‐Printed 3D Macroscale Glass Objects

Lin

Song

et al. 2020

Adv Materials Technologies

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

and fine chemical industries. [1][2][3][4][5][6] As a core element of microfluidic technology, high-performance fabrication of hollow microchannels with freeform geometries is crucial for further developing innovative microfluidic technology. In particular, extension of the microfluidic networks from widely used 2D to 3D configurations has now been considered as a promising scheme to enhance the performance of manipulation of fluids such as high-efficiency mixing, separation, and detection. [7][8][9][10][11] Fused silica is one of the widely used substrates for the microfluidic technology in laboratory research and industrial applications due to its high melting point, high chemical stability, low thermal expansion coefficient, wide transmission spectral range, and good biocompatibility. However, fabrication of freeform 3D hollow microchannels in fused silica is still difficult for current 2D fabrication techniques in terms of complex and tedious fabrication procedures, additional costs for aligning, stacking, and bonding steps. [12][13][14] Currently, one of the most representative 3D microfabrication techniques of fused silica is ultrashort pulse laser microfabrication. [15][16][17][18][19][20] A suspended hollow microchannel structure with a 3D controllable configuration can be fabricated in a way of either laser-assisted selective wet etching [21][22][23] or liquid-assisted laser ablation. [24][25][26] In addition, suspended hollow structures with 3D shapes and a high precision in fused silica can be fabricated by combining room-temperature casting and sacrificial template replication. [27] Meanwhile, 3D printing of glass materials emerging in recent years brings some new opportunities for scalable fabrication of freeform glass structures by either additive manufacturing strategies [28][29][30][31][32][33] or laser subtractive processing methods. [34][35][36] However, controllable formation of freeform hollow microchannel with arbitrary length encapsulated in 3D printed glass structures has not yet been demonstrated, which is highly desirable for high-infidelity manufacturing of artificial organs, on-chip construction of biomimetic microenvironments, [37][38][39][40][41] as well as enrichment of the functions of continuous-flow microreactors (e.g., seamless integration of customized functional module for temperature control and on-line spectrometer monitoring). [42,43] Especially, simultaneous fabrication of 3D embedded hollow microchannels with high aspect ratios and centimeter-scale glass objects with external arbitrary shapes on/in a single substrate still Large-scale microfluidic microsystems with complex 3D configurations are highly in demand by both fundamental research and industrial application, holding the potentials for fostering a wide range of innovative applications such as organ-on-a-chip as well as continuous-flow manufacturing. However, freeform fabrication of such systems remains challenging for current fabrication techniques in terms of fabrication resolution, flexibility, and achievable foo...

show abstract

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Freeform Microfluidic Networks Encapsulated in Laser‐Printed 3D Macroscale Glass Objects

Lin

Song

et al. 2020

Adv Materials Technologies

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Microfluidics is the science that uses micro‐sized devices to manipulate and transport very small volumes of fluids (order of microliter to femtoliter). Microfluidics may be considered as a multidisciplinary science that has been used in several fields and applications such as chemistry , microelectronics , molecular and clinical diagnostics , environmental monitoring , food control and engineering , and detection and screening of residues of explosives . It is already a well‐established research topic and has also attracted attention of industry due to novel methods and products developed using this technology .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Its use for the production of ME devices is widely reported . This well‐established method enables the fabrication of microscale structures with great precision and efficiency . However, soft lithography has some related difficulties that include relatively high cost, necessity of technical training, long times requested for fabrication of the molds and masks and the fact that generally clean room facilities are required.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, soft lithography has some related difficulties that include relatively high cost, necessity of technical training, long times requested for fabrication of the molds and masks and the fact that generally clean room facilities are required. These points may be an obstacle to many groups that do not have easy access to such technologies and limit the development of researches involving microfluidics .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Rapid and inexpensive method for the simple fabrication of PDMS‐based electrochemical sensors for detection in microfluidic devices

2019

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The fabrication of PDMS microfluidic structures through soft lithography is widely reported. While this well‐established method gives high precision microstructures and has been successfully used for many researchers, it often requires sophisticated instrumentation and expensive materials such as clean room facilities and photoresists. Thus, we present here a simple protocol that allows the rapid molding of simple linear microchannels in PDMS substrates aiming microfluidics‐based applications. It might serve as an alternative to researchers that do not have access to sophisticated facilities such as clean rooms. The method developed here consists on the use of pencil graphite leads as template for the molding of PDMS channels. It yields structures that can be used for several applications, such as housing support for electrochemical sensors or channels for flow devices. Here, the microdevices produced through this protocol were employed for the accommodation of carbon black paste, which was utilized for the first time as amperometric sensor in microchip electrophoresis. This platform was successfully used for the separation and detection of model analytes. Ascorbic acid and iodide were separated within 45 s with peak resolution of 1.2 and sensitivities of 198 and 492 pA/μM, respectively. The background noise was ca. 84 pA. The analytical usefulness of the system developed was successfully tested through the quantification of iodide in commercial pharmaceutical formulations. It demonstrates good efficiency of the microfabrication protocol developed and enables its use for the easy and rapid prototyping of PDMS structures over a low fabrication cost.

show abstract

“…[16] Based on this finding, we demonstrated selective electroplating of a 3D printed fused filament fabrication (FFF) part, combining conductive composite filament to define plated regions with a nonconductive plastic as a mechanical support. [18] While successful, the composite we used was resistive relative to traditional electroplating seed layers, requiring electrical contact near the region being plated and therefore strongly limiting the complexity of the resulting parts and preventing use for electronics packaging. [18] While successful, the composite we used was resistive relative to traditional electroplating seed layers, requiring electrical contact near the region being plated and therefore strongly limiting the complexity of the resulting parts and preventing use for electronics packaging.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Selective Electroplating for 3D‐Printed Electronics

Lazarus

Bedair

Hawasli

et al. 2019

Adv Materials Technologies

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In this paper, we demonstrate electroplating copper and nickel selectively onto traces printed in a highly conductive thermoplastic composite filament and use of the resulting bulk metal conductors for 3D printed electronics packaging. Electroless plating has long been used for metallization of polymer 3D printed parts [9,10] to obtain superior mechanical and electrical properties, but results in blanket deposition of metal over the entire part. Since most 3D printable plastics are difficult to directly electrolessly plate, metallization through this technique is typically a multistep process requiring roughening [11] and surface activation [12] for proper plating. Creating separate electrodes using electroless plating requires additional steps to define the conductors, for instance through laser ablation, [13] variable swelling, [14] or mechanical polishing. [15] In 2017, researchers demonstrated that conductive polymer composites can be used as a conductive seed layer for electroplating. [16] Based on this finding, we demonstrated selective electroplating of a 3D printed fused filament fabrication (FFF) part, combining conductive composite filament to define plated regions with a nonconductive plastic as a mechanical support. [17] Fused filament fabrication, the extrusion of melted thermoplastics to build a part, is a cheap and widely available 3D printing technology. [18] While successful, the composite we used was resistive relative to traditional electroplating seed layers, requiring electrical contact near the region being plated and therefore strongly limiting the complexity of the resulting parts and preventing use for electronics packaging. Building on our work, a group at Southeast University in China subsequently demonstrated the use of a similar dual filament FFF 3D printing process to define regions for selective electroless plating through selective adhesion onto two different printable polymers and showed its use for 3D printed electronic packaging. [19] Electroless plating is however significantly slower than electroplating, [20] limiting possible deposition thickness, and also unlike electroplating lacks the ability to selectively plate different thicknesses or materials on the same part. A more detailed survey of past work on electro-and electroless plating of 3D printed parts was also given in ref. [17].Here, we use a very low resistivity filament to plate centimeters from the contact point and demonstrate the ability to selectively plate complex 3D parts such as electronic packages and 3D printed circuit boards (PCBs). A very low resistivity copperbased FFF filament developed at Duke University and commercialized under the name Electrifi [21] was recently demonstrated Creating 3D-printed parts with embedded circuitry is the next frontier in additive manufacturing, but printing of conductors with performance comparable to bulk metals such as copper is a difficult challenge. A hybrid process based on 3D printing followed by electroplating on highly conductive thermoplastic filament is used to ma...

show abstract

3D printed microfluidics and microelectronics

Cited by 187 publications

References 199 publications

Freeform Microfluidic Networks Encapsulated in Laser‐Printed 3D Macroscale Glass Objects

Freeform Microfluidic Networks Encapsulated in Laser‐Printed 3D Macroscale Glass Objects

Rapid and inexpensive method for the simple fabrication of PDMS‐based electrochemical sensors for detection in microfluidic devices

Selective Electroplating for 3D‐Printed Electronics

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About