Rapid prototyping of thermoplastic microfluidic devices via SLA 3D printing

Abstract

Microfluidic devices have immense potential for widespread community use, but a current bottleneck is the transition from research prototyping into mass production because the gold standard prototyping strategy is too costly and labor intensive when scaling up fabrication throughput. For increased throughput, it is common to mold devices out of thermoplastics due to low per-unit costs at high volumes. However, conventional fabrication methods have high upfront development expenses with slow mold fabrication methods that limit the speed of design evolution for expedited marketability. To overcome this limitation, we propose a rapid prototyping protocol to fabricate thermoplastic devices from a stereolithography (SLA) 3D printed template through intermediate steps akin to those employed in soft lithography. We apply this process towards the design of self-operating capillaric circuits, well suited for deployment as low-cost decentralized assays. Rapid development of these geometry- and material-dependent devices benefits from prototyping with thermoplastics. We validated the constructed capillaric circuits by performing an autonomous, pre-programmed, bead-based immunofluorescent assay for protein quantification. Overall, this prototyping method provides a valuable means for quickly iterating and refining microfluidic devices, paving the way for future scaling of production.