Injection molded microfluidic chips featuring integrated interconnects

Abstract

An injection molding process for the fabrication of disposable plastic microfluidic chips with a cycle time of 2 min has been designed, developed, and implemented. Of the sixteen commercially available grades of cyclo-olefin copolymer (COC) that were screened for autofluorescence and transparency to ultraviolet (UV) light, Topas 8007 x 10 was identified as the most suitable for production. A robust solid metal mold insert defining the microfluidic channels was rapidly microfabricated using a process that significantly reduces the time required for electroplating. No wear of the insert was observed even after over 1000 cycles. The chips were bonded by thermal fusion using different bonding conditions. Each condition was tested and its suitability evaluated by burst pressure measurements. The COC microfluidic chips feature novel, integrated, reversible, standardized, ready-to-use interconnects that enable operation at pressures up to 15.6 MPa, the highest value reported to date. The suitability of these UV transparent, high pressure-resistant, disposable devices was demonstrated by in situ preparation of a high surface area porous polymer monolith within the channels.

Automated, Miniaturized, and Integrated Quality Control-on-Chip (QC-on-a-Chip) for Cell-Based Cancer Therapy Applications

“…Hot-embossing involves the use of a variety flat thermoplastic sheets, such as polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA), polycarbonate (PC), cyclic olefin copolymer (COC), polystyrene (PS), polyvinylchloride (PVC), and polyethyleneterephthalate (PETG) (Becker and Locascio, 2002;Novak et al, 2013;Ren et al, 2013), which are molded against a master using pressure and heat (Locascio et al, 2006). In turn, injection molding involves the high-pressure injection of pre-polymerized molten thermoplastic granules into a heated molding cavity (Mair et al, 2006;Attia et al, 2009), which allows the high-throughput industry-scale fabrication of thermoplastic devices. A detailed description of microfabrication methods of lab-on-a-chip devices can be found elsewhere (Fiorini and Chiu, 2005;Kim et al, 2008a;Coltro et al, 2010;Sollier et al, 2011;Wu and Gu, 2011).…”

Elastomer Application in Microsystem and Microfluidics

“…In general, PDMS is not the good materials of choice for high performance liquid chromatography. In such instance, other thermoplastics such as polyimide (PI) 85 , fuse silica capillary 75 , cyclic olefin copolymer (CoC) 86 , are recommended.…”

Precision moulding of biomimetic disposable chips for droplet-based applications

“…Cyclic olefin copolymer (COC) (Mair et al 2006) and polycarbonate (PC) (Sun et al 2005) are well-established thermoplastic materials for microfluidic applications since they are optically transparent, sterilisable, easy to handle and economically priced. However, micro-channel surfaces of fluidic chips moulded from these polymers by standard injection moulding processes do not support a stable and reproducible droplet generation process.…”