DESIGN AND FABRICATION OF MICROFLUIDIC PLATFORM USING PHOTOSENSITIVE RESIST AS FLUID CHANNEL MASTER MOLD

• Main Author: Irene Christiani, Angelica
• Format: Final Project
• Language: Indonesia
• Online Access: https://digilib.itb.ac.id/gdl/view/50293
• Institution: Institut Teknologi Bandung

Microfluidics is the science of fluid manipulation in the micro scale. This science offers a lot of potential, especially in the fields that rely heavily on fluid processing and analysis, such as biology, chemistry, pharmacy, and biomedicine. The nature of fluid processing in microfluidics allows us to use smaller amount of samples and reagents, resulting in lower cost, shorter processing and analysis duration, higher sensitivity, and high portability. However, since it was founded, microfluidics has seen a rather slow adaptation rate and the macro-scale fluidic systems are still preferred in the fields mentioned previously. This mainly resulted from the obstacles faced in the fabrication process, such as high cost in materials and equipment, and the lengthy fabrication time. Hence, in this paper, an experiment on the most popular microfluidic fabrication technique, soft lithography, is conducted. Soft lithography is a fabrication method that combines photolithography and replica molding to engrave microchannel structures onto the surface of an elastomer or organic polymer. In this paper, a few modifications were done regarding materials, equipment, and methodology used in soft lithography. The purpose of the modification is to simplify the fabrication process, lowering cost, and shortening the fabrication time so it becomes a lot more affordable for people that need it in the future. This modified fabrication technique requires no expertise or high-end equipment to be conducted. From the results, we found that the combination of the materials chosen in this experiment, polyimide sheet and commercially-available photoresist materials (dry film photoresist and photosensitive ink), can produce a durable microfluidic platform mold that survives the high-temperature curing process of PDMS and the release of the platform without detaching from the substrate or breaking. This characteristic may allow the mold to be reused for several times, increasing efficiency of the mold. In addition to that, polydimethylsiloxane used in replica molding was also able to copy the mold produced in the previous process and turn into a functional microfluidic platform. However, we acknowledge that there are still a lot of adjustments that need to be done in order to maximize the resolution of the mold. Nonetheless, the result of the experiment shows that the materials and equipment used in this paper can produce a functional microfluidic platform in a significantly shorter time and lower cost.