Li Yi, Lai Sam H S, Liu Na, Zhang Guanglie, Liu Lianqing, Lee Gwo-Bin, Li Wen Jung
Department of Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong, China.
State Key Laboratory of Robotics, Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Shenyang 110016, China.
Micromachines (Basel). 2016 Apr 12;7(4):65. doi: 10.3390/mi7040065.
We present a rapid hydrogel polymerization and prototyping microfabrication technique using an optically induced electrokinetics (OEK) chip, which is based on a non-UV hydrogel curing principle. Using this technique, micro-scale high-aspect-ratio three-dimensional polymer features with different geometric sizes can be fabricated within 1⁻10 min by projecting pre-defined visible light image patterns onto the OEK chip. This method eliminates the need for traditional photolithography masks used for patterning and fabricating polymer microstructures and simplifies the fabrication processes. This technique uses cross-link hydrogels, such as (PEGDA), as fabrication materials. We demonstrated that hydrogel micropillar arrays rapidly fabricated using this technique can be used as molds to create micron-scale cavities in PDMS () substrates. Furthermore, hollow, circular tubes with controllable wall thicknesses and high-aspect ratios can also be fabricated. These results show the potential of this technique to become a rapid prototyping technology for producing microfluidic devices. In addition, we show that rapid prototyping of three-dimensional suspended polymer structures is possible without any sacrificial etching process.
我们展示了一种使用光诱导电动（OEK）芯片的快速水凝胶聚合和原型微制造技术，该技术基于非紫外光水凝胶固化原理。利用该技术，通过将预定义的可见光图像图案投射到OEK芯片上，可在1至10分钟内制造出具有不同几何尺寸的微尺度高纵横比三维聚合物特征。该方法无需用于聚合物微结构图案化和制造的传统光刻掩模，简化了制造过程。此技术使用交联水凝胶，如聚乙二醇二丙烯酸酯（PEGDA）作为制造材料。我们证明，使用该技术快速制造的水凝胶微柱阵列可用作模具，在聚二甲基硅氧烷（PDMS）基板中制造微米级腔体。此外，还可制造壁厚可控且纵横比高的空心圆形管。这些结果表明该技术有潜力成为生产微流控设备的快速原型技术。此外，我们还表明，无需任何牺牲蚀刻工艺即可实现三维悬浮聚合物结构的快速原型制作。
