Low azeotropic solvent for bonding of PMMA microfluidic devices

Safe and cost-effective rapid-prototyping of multilayer PMMA microfluidic devices

“…For readability, the horizontal dash line indicates the absence of deformation. The collective reading of the three tests (shear stress, burst, deformation) against each of the parameters (pressure, time, temperature) gives a clear reading of the optimal parameters, highlighted by the white zones for each parameter detailed in this study is higher than any previously reported for PMMA in the microfluidic literature, where the usual range is 0.5-0.6 MPa (Hsu and Chen 2007;Romoli et al 2011;Tran et al 2013) with a highest previously reported operating pressure of 2.6 MPa (Lin et al 2007) (calculated). It should be noted that the failure point for most previous burst test studies occurred at the connections.…”

“…Surface modification and solvent-assisted bonding (Brown et al 2006) which can change surface shape but usually involve highly toxic chemicals (chloromethane, dichloromethane, chloroform) are other proposed methods. Furthermore, both methods can lead to clogging of the channels (Lin et al 2007). Variants of the aforementioned solutions include the use of UV light to activate surfaces (Tran et al 2013), microwave heating combined with a conductive layer [patterned gold (Toossi et al 2015), conductive polymer (Holmes et al 2011) or metal clips acting on a solvent layer (Mona et al 2010)], or plasma treatment , which can be optimised to reach a bonding strength of 0.57 MPa in 20 min (Zhifu et al 2015).…”

“…Variants of the aforementioned solutions include the use of UV light to activate surfaces (Tran et al 2013), microwave heating combined with a conductive layer [patterned gold (Toossi et al 2015), conductive polymer (Holmes et al 2011) or metal clips acting on a solvent layer (Mona et al 2010)], or plasma treatment , which can be optimised to reach a bonding strength of 0.57 MPa in 20 min (Zhifu et al 2015). Generally these procedures are time-consuming and require specialist equipment (Lin et al 2007). It was shown that containment grooves between the layers to bond can improve the efficiency of solvent-assisted bonding methods (Wan et al 2015).…”

Polymer bonding by induction heating for microfluidic applications

“…Lin et al developed a method for sealing PMMA based microfluidic systems in 7 minutes at room temperature [17]. First the substrates' surfaces were cleaned using acetone.…”

Detection of immunoglobulins in a laser induced fluorescence system utilizing polydimethysiloxane microchips with advanced surface and optical properties

“…In principle, our LIF apparatus will work with microchips fabricated from other substrates with proper optical and chemical properties ͑glass, polystyrene, polymethylmethacrylate, etc.͒. 28 In Sec. II, we shortly describe a "prepolymerization" method for the PDMS chip fabrication, the method used for PDMS substrate modification, the mIgG immunoassay procedure including the used immobilization technique, and the construction of the LIF detector.…”