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Fused Deposition Modeling of Microfluidic Chips in Polymethylmethacrylate

Polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA) is one of the most important thermoplastic materials and is a widely used material in microfluidics. However, PMMA is usually structured using industrial scale replication processes, such as hot embossing or injection molding, not compatible with rapid prototyping. In t...

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Autores principales: Kotz, Frederik, Mader, Markus, Dellen, Nils, Risch, Patrick, Kick, Andrea, Helmer, Dorothea, Rapp, Bastian E.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7570108/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32961823
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/mi11090873
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author Kotz, Frederik
Mader, Markus
Dellen, Nils
Risch, Patrick
Kick, Andrea
Helmer, Dorothea
Rapp, Bastian E.
author_facet Kotz, Frederik
Mader, Markus
Dellen, Nils
Risch, Patrick
Kick, Andrea
Helmer, Dorothea
Rapp, Bastian E.
author_sort Kotz, Frederik
collection PubMed
description Polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA) is one of the most important thermoplastic materials and is a widely used material in microfluidics. However, PMMA is usually structured using industrial scale replication processes, such as hot embossing or injection molding, not compatible with rapid prototyping. In this work, we demonstrate that microfluidic chips made from PMMA can be 3D printed using fused deposition modeling (FDM). We demonstrate that using FDM microfluidic chips with a minimum channel cross-section of ~300 µm can be printed and a variety of different channel geometries and mixer structures are shown. The optical transparency of the chips is shown to be significantly enhanced by printing onto commercial PMMA substrates. The use of such commercial PMMA substrates also enables the integration of PMMA microstructures into the printed chips, by first generating a microstructure on the PMMA substrates, and subsequently printing the PMMA chip around the microstructure. We further demonstrate that protein patterns can be generated within previously printed microfluidic chips by employing a method of photobleaching. The FDM printing of microfluidic chips in PMMA allows the use of one of microfluidics’ most used industrial materials on the laboratory scale and thus significantly simplifies the transfer from results gained in the lab to an industrial product.
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spelling pubmed-75701082020-10-28 Fused Deposition Modeling of Microfluidic Chips in Polymethylmethacrylate Kotz, Frederik Mader, Markus Dellen, Nils Risch, Patrick Kick, Andrea Helmer, Dorothea Rapp, Bastian E. Micromachines (Basel) Article Polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA) is one of the most important thermoplastic materials and is a widely used material in microfluidics. However, PMMA is usually structured using industrial scale replication processes, such as hot embossing or injection molding, not compatible with rapid prototyping. In this work, we demonstrate that microfluidic chips made from PMMA can be 3D printed using fused deposition modeling (FDM). We demonstrate that using FDM microfluidic chips with a minimum channel cross-section of ~300 µm can be printed and a variety of different channel geometries and mixer structures are shown. The optical transparency of the chips is shown to be significantly enhanced by printing onto commercial PMMA substrates. The use of such commercial PMMA substrates also enables the integration of PMMA microstructures into the printed chips, by first generating a microstructure on the PMMA substrates, and subsequently printing the PMMA chip around the microstructure. We further demonstrate that protein patterns can be generated within previously printed microfluidic chips by employing a method of photobleaching. The FDM printing of microfluidic chips in PMMA allows the use of one of microfluidics’ most used industrial materials on the laboratory scale and thus significantly simplifies the transfer from results gained in the lab to an industrial product. MDPI 2020-09-19 /pmc/articles/PMC7570108/ /pubmed/32961823 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/mi11090873 Text en © 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Kotz, Frederik
Mader, Markus
Dellen, Nils
Risch, Patrick
Kick, Andrea
Helmer, Dorothea
Rapp, Bastian E.
Fused Deposition Modeling of Microfluidic Chips in Polymethylmethacrylate
title Fused Deposition Modeling of Microfluidic Chips in Polymethylmethacrylate
title_full Fused Deposition Modeling of Microfluidic Chips in Polymethylmethacrylate
title_fullStr Fused Deposition Modeling of Microfluidic Chips in Polymethylmethacrylate
title_full_unstemmed Fused Deposition Modeling of Microfluidic Chips in Polymethylmethacrylate
title_short Fused Deposition Modeling of Microfluidic Chips in Polymethylmethacrylate
title_sort fused deposition modeling of microfluidic chips in polymethylmethacrylate
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7570108/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32961823
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/mi11090873
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