The goal is to create a flow device for simulating blood flow over endothelial cells in arteries. Bifurcation angles are varying, and the branches may not have the same diameter as the main channel. I do not have access to sophisticated casting/moulding equipment.
Hi Priyam,
Considering your channel dimensions (which is relatively large) you can use either laser micromachining or CNC to fabricate your master mold on PMMA. Then you can simply cast PDMS on it form your channel.
Hi Navid,
Thanks for your answer.
Unfortunately, I do not have CNC or laser machining at my disposal. I was thinking of using a simpler method- something along the lines of microwire moulding. I can't seem to figure out how a smooth branch point could be got this way.
Hi priyam,
Yes you can easily use a wire molding technique for the fabrication of the mm scale channels in the pdms. Depending upon how skill fully you make the master mold with the wires and their joints, your smoothness at the joints will be defined. With some trials (you need to be quit innovative at designing the master mold) you should be able to get the similar geometry and the smoothness as that of arteries. One measure concern that usually inhibits the drawing of such large diameter wires is that the increased contact surface area of the large diameter wires. There will be competition between the adhesive force of pdms with wires and the elasticity of the wires. If the force of adhesion is large, no matter what you do, the wire drawing method will always end up with arbitrarily breaking the wire inside the channels or the pdms channel itself while you try to draw them out. There are various solutions to it. Just explore the method, it is one of the most effective and high yield process to make complex structures in microfluidics as compare to cnc, laser cutting and the 2D plannar soft lithography.
Regards
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