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Fused Deposition Modeling of Microfluidic Chips in Transparent Polystyrene

Polystyrene (PS) is one of the most commonly used thermoplastic materials worldwide and plays a ubiquitous role in today’s biomedical and life science industry and research. The main advantage of PS lies in its facile processability, its excellent optical and mechanical properties, as well as its bi...

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Autores principales: Mader, Markus, Rein, Christof, Konrat, Eveline, Meermeyer, Sophia Lena, Lee-Thedieck, Cornelia, Kotz-Helmer, Frederik, Rapp, Bastian E.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8618114/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34832759
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/mi12111348
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author Mader, Markus
Rein, Christof
Konrat, Eveline
Meermeyer, Sophia Lena
Lee-Thedieck, Cornelia
Kotz-Helmer, Frederik
Rapp, Bastian E.
author_facet Mader, Markus
Rein, Christof
Konrat, Eveline
Meermeyer, Sophia Lena
Lee-Thedieck, Cornelia
Kotz-Helmer, Frederik
Rapp, Bastian E.
author_sort Mader, Markus
collection PubMed
description Polystyrene (PS) is one of the most commonly used thermoplastic materials worldwide and plays a ubiquitous role in today’s biomedical and life science industry and research. The main advantage of PS lies in its facile processability, its excellent optical and mechanical properties, as well as its biocompatibility. However, PS is only rarely used in microfluidic prototyping, since the structuring of PS is mainly performed using industrial-scale replication processes. So far, microfluidic chips in PS have not been accessible to rapid prototyping via 3D printing. In this work, we present, for the first time, 3D printing of transparent PS using fused deposition modeling (FDM). We present FDM printing of transparent PS microfluidic channels with dimensions as small as 300 µm and a high transparency in the region of interest. Furthermore, we demonstrate the fabrication of functional chips such as Tesla-mixer and mixer cascades. Cell culture experiments showed a high cell viability during seven days of culturing, as well as enabling cell adhesion and proliferation. With the aid of this new PS prototyping method, the development of future biomedical microfluidic chips will be significantly accelerated, as it enables using PS from the early academic prototyping all the way to industrial-scale mass replication.
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spelling pubmed-86181142021-11-27 Fused Deposition Modeling of Microfluidic Chips in Transparent Polystyrene Mader, Markus Rein, Christof Konrat, Eveline Meermeyer, Sophia Lena Lee-Thedieck, Cornelia Kotz-Helmer, Frederik Rapp, Bastian E. Micromachines (Basel) Article Polystyrene (PS) is one of the most commonly used thermoplastic materials worldwide and plays a ubiquitous role in today’s biomedical and life science industry and research. The main advantage of PS lies in its facile processability, its excellent optical and mechanical properties, as well as its biocompatibility. However, PS is only rarely used in microfluidic prototyping, since the structuring of PS is mainly performed using industrial-scale replication processes. So far, microfluidic chips in PS have not been accessible to rapid prototyping via 3D printing. In this work, we present, for the first time, 3D printing of transparent PS using fused deposition modeling (FDM). We present FDM printing of transparent PS microfluidic channels with dimensions as small as 300 µm and a high transparency in the region of interest. Furthermore, we demonstrate the fabrication of functional chips such as Tesla-mixer and mixer cascades. Cell culture experiments showed a high cell viability during seven days of culturing, as well as enabling cell adhesion and proliferation. With the aid of this new PS prototyping method, the development of future biomedical microfluidic chips will be significantly accelerated, as it enables using PS from the early academic prototyping all the way to industrial-scale mass replication. MDPI 2021-10-31 /pmc/articles/PMC8618114/ /pubmed/34832759 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/mi12111348 Text en © 2021 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/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 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Mader, Markus
Rein, Christof
Konrat, Eveline
Meermeyer, Sophia Lena
Lee-Thedieck, Cornelia
Kotz-Helmer, Frederik
Rapp, Bastian E.
Fused Deposition Modeling of Microfluidic Chips in Transparent Polystyrene
title Fused Deposition Modeling of Microfluidic Chips in Transparent Polystyrene
title_full Fused Deposition Modeling of Microfluidic Chips in Transparent Polystyrene
title_fullStr Fused Deposition Modeling of Microfluidic Chips in Transparent Polystyrene
title_full_unstemmed Fused Deposition Modeling of Microfluidic Chips in Transparent Polystyrene
title_short Fused Deposition Modeling of Microfluidic Chips in Transparent Polystyrene
title_sort fused deposition modeling of microfluidic chips in transparent polystyrene
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8618114/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34832759
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/mi12111348
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