High speed microfluidic prototyping by programmable proximity aperture MeV ion beam lithography

Development of a microfluidic design for an automatic lab-on-chip operation

“…This chip ensured spontaneous flow of liquid through the microchannels under the action of capillary forces (Puttaraksa et al 2013). Figure 2b is a scaled ALOCO chip and Fig.…”

“…The PMMA films of ∼9 µm thickness were produced as previously described (Puttaraksa et al 2013). The samples were irradiated with an ion beam of 3 MeV 4 He 2+ ions at an ion fluence of ∼2.5 × 10 13 ions/cm 2 for making latent image of desired structures.…”

“…The open microchannel structures were then capped with a PMMA film of 50 µm thickness from Goodfellow T M , to form closed channels. This process was completed by using thermal bonding on a hotplate at ∼110 0 C (Puttaraksa et al 2013). To follow the flow of liquids in the chips, red-, blue-and un-dyed DI water was used.…”

“…The LOC technology generally uses microfluidics for manipulating liquids flowing in microchannels (Squires and Quake 2005;Whitesides 2006). Actuation and control of the flow of liquids in such devices can be hydraulic (syringe pump) (Puttaraksa et al 2012), electrokinetic (Bousse et al 2000), acoustic (Yeo and Friend 2009), centrifugal (Cho et al 2007), and capillary (Juncker et al 2002;Puttaraksa et al 2013). However, many of these methods require external components, e.g.…”

“…Moreover, mass production of the channel structures is possible by so-called nanoimprint lithography (NIL) (Ansari et al 2006) or aperture/stencil mask MeV ion beam lithography (Brun et al 2013). Additionally, fabrication of PMMA/PMMA/Si microfluidic device using the PPAL technique is a fast development of a microfluidic prototype because of its maskless lithography method (Puttaraksa et al 2013). The microfluidic prototype could be used for high-throughput fabrication in PMMA e.g.…”