CO2 Laser Micromachining for Rapid Fabrication of a Four Layer Poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA)-based Microfluidic Diluter
X. Chen, J. Shen and M. Zhou
The CO2 laser is practical, efficient and an inexpensive selection to fabricate microchannels on polymer substrate. Poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) is one of the most common polymer substrate material for microfluidic chips. A combined technology of CO2 laser and thermal bonding is presented to fabricate rapidly four layer PMMA-based microfluidic chips. The effects of laser power, laser scanning speed, channel length and processing times on channel quality were shown and the priority was given according to orthogonal experiment. The optimal parameters of thermal bonding was obtained and the high quality four layer PMMA-based microfluidic chip was obtained. It is demonstrated that the presented method is suitable to fabricate rapidly the multilayer PMMA-based microfluidic chip.
Keywords: CO2 laser, poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA), microfluidic chip, thermal bonding, orthogonal experiment