I tried to remove sticky pdms and/ or curing agent with solvents like ethanol, methanol and isoproyl alcohol but now, I am left with marks of these solvents along with the sticky pdms that didn't get removed. Can someone please suggest an appropriate solvent to remove these from the master mold, without affecting the microfluidic channels on it?
Thank you very much in advance.
Why is your PDMS so sticky? Are you using a very complicated structure of high aspect ratio? Or have you baked enough? Baking only 2hrs often result in very sticky PDMS, so you might want to bake PDMS completely. If your aspect ratio is high and causes stickiness, I advise you to treat the silica wafer and SU8 master mold with something like HMDS to make it less adhesive.
You can try using a wipe soaked with acetone and immediately wipe/wash it with water.
Thanks a lot for your answers, Syunghun and Narjes. It could possibly be due to some uncured PDMS on the mold, resulting from improper mixing. I did bake it for about 3 hours just to be sure. Anyway, I poured another round of PDMS and that cleaned the mold. Thanks again, though. Much appreciated!
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