I have microfluidic device which has mold made up of acrylic which has been micro milled. Due to micro milling, the surface is rough and when I cast PDMS over it, the PDMS surface also becomes rough. Can any of you suggest a protocol for plasma bonding (or any other bonding technique) to bond such rough PDMS surface to smooth PDMS surface? Thank you in advance!
Dear Viraj Mehta, similar question is posted in RG with the link below. Please make contact since you are in a commun situation. My Regards
https://www.researchgate.net/post/How_can_I_bond_PDMS_and_PEG-DA
What level of roughness are we talking about? What are the feature dimensions of the mould?
My first suggestion would be aiming to reduce the roughness of the acrylic. You could try a two-step micromachining process, using two bits (a coarse run followed by a fine run) to reduce tooling time.
You could also look at wet chemical processes to reduce surface roughness. I used to smooth 3D-printed moulds with ethanol (material dependent) using a rapid dip into ethanol then water.
In terms of plasma bonding. Please can you stipulate the equipment you will use (do you have ability to adjust power, flow rate, etc.).
Jules
We also use micromilled acrylic substrates to fabricate microfluidic chips, and had the same problem, we found that with an acetone vapor treatment, the roughness dminished enough for the bonding to be succesfull.
in this article we describe the method and the results Article Micro–Macro: Selective Integration of Microfeatures Inside L...
We´ve also tried spin-coating PDMS mixed in a 3:7 ratio on a glass slide, then diping the PDMS replica on the glass slide and then placing it in the other substrate and baking it for 30 minutes at 80°C. With this method we found that if the microchanels are too small (
Diego Zamarron-Hernandez Thank you for your suggestion. I will definitely try acetone vapor treatment.
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