Facile Fabrication of Microchannel with Unconventional Cross-Section Using 3D Printed Sacrificial Mould

TANG Wen-Lai ^1,2, ,
FAN Ning ¹ ,
LI Zong-An ^1,2 ,
XIANG Nan ³ ,
YANG Ji-Quan ^1,2

1.
Jiangsu Key Laboratory of 3D Printing Equipment and Manufacturing, School of Electrical and Automation Engineering, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing 210023, China;
2.
Nanjing Institute of Intelligent High-end Equipment Industry Co., Ltd., Nanjing 210042, China;
3.
Jiangsu Key Laboratory for Design and Manufacture of Micro-Nano Biomedical Instruments, School of Mechanical Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing 211189, China

Received Date: 7 March 2019

Fund Project: This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 51805272), the Key Technology R&D Program of Jiangsu Province (Nos. BE2018010-1, BE2018010-2), the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (No. BK20170792), and the Natural Science Fund for Colleges and Universities in Jiangsu Province (No. 18KJB460022).

In this work, a novel 3D printed mould-removal method was proposed to fabricate the microchannels with unconventional cross-sections. By modifying the orifice shape of extrusion nozzle with picosecond laser cutting technology, the ABS microchannel moulds with arbitrary cross-sections could be facilely printed by using an ordinary desktop FDM printer. After conducting the PDMS casting and ABS dissolving, the all-PDMS microfluidic chips could be easily produced without complex bonding process. To verify effectiveness of the proposed method, the microchannels with square, semielliptical and triangular sections were designed and successfully fabricated. It was also found that the size of the microchannel section could be flexibly adjusted by just controlling the ABS extrusion amount during the channel mould printing. At last, to explore the effects of channel section on the particle inertial focusing behaviours, the particle lateral migrations in the semielliptical and triangular microchannels were systematically investigated. The results showed that, with the increase of flow rate, the particles flowing in the microchannels moved gradually and laterally to the regions near the centers of each channel edge, and finally forming three stable equilibrium positions for both semielliptical and triangular microchannels.

Facile Fabrication of Microchannel with Unconventional Cross-Section Using 3D Printed Sacrificial Mould

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