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Process chain for the mass production of polymeric microfluidic chips

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Abstract

The moulding process is a low-cost method for the mass production of microfluidic chips, rather than fabricating the chips one by one. The precision manufacturing of the mould is the key to the moulding process, which usually includes a combination of several machining processes. However, most of the current studies focus on a single process in microfluidic chip fabrication, which makes it difficult to optimise the fabrication process, resulting in low production efficiency and high energy consumption. Therefore, to realize the low cost and sustainable mass production of microfluidic chips, the process chain is developed in this paper. The process chain includes milling, precision ultrasonic vibration–assisted grinding, fluid jet polishing, and injection moulding. Parametric experiments regarding the key parameters of grinding, polishing, and injection moulding are conducted to obtain the optimization conditions. The form accuracy of the microchannel reaches 8.594 μm, and the roughness at the bottom surface of the microchannel is 0.027 μm. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed process chain is effective and feasible for the mass production of microfluidic chips with high surface quality. It also provides some theoretical bases for the manufacturing of structured surfaces with nanometric surface roughness.

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Funding

The work described in this paper was mainly supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 51805334), the International Science and Technology Cooperation Project of Shenzhen City (No. GJHZ20190822091805371), the Guangdong Natural Science Foundation Program 2019–2020 (No. 2019A1515012015), and the Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Macau Technology Research Programme (Project No: SGDX20220530110804030).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Guangdong Key Laboratory of Electromagnetic Control and Intelligent Robots, College of Mechatronics and Control Engineering, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, 518060, China

    Yanjun Lu, Bo Liu & Mingrong Guo

  2. State Key Laboratory of Ultra-Precision Machining Technology, Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong, China

    Zili Zhang & Chunjin Wang

  3. State Key Laboratory of Tribology in Advanced Equipment, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China

    Jianjian Wang

  4. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 10084, China

    Jianjian Wang

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  1. Yanjun Lu
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  2. Bo Liu
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  3. Zili Zhang
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  4. Mingrong Guo
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  5. Jianjian Wang
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study’s conception and design. Material preparation, data collection, and analysis were performed by Yanjun Lu, Bo Liu, and Zili Zhang. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Yanjun Lu, and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Chunjin Wang.

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Lu, Y., Liu, B., Zhang, Z. et al. Process chain for the mass production of polymeric microfluidic chips. Int J Adv Manuf Technol 127, 3665–3680 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00170-023-11773-8

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