Journal
NATURE COMMUNICATIONS
Volume 12, Issue 1, Pages -Publisher
NATURE PORTFOLIO
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-25788-w
Keywords
-
Categories
Funding
- NIH [R15GM123405-02, R01EB027096]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
The authors present a generalized 3D printing process that allows for fast parallel fabrication of miniaturized, high resolution 3D components, especially beneficial for high-resolution microfluidic device fabrication.
The ever-growing need for highly functional, compact, and integrated microfluidic devices often incurs lengthy and expensive manufacturing processes. Here, authors introduce a generalized 3D printing process that enables fast parallel fabrication of miniaturized, high resolution 3D components. Traditional 3D printing based on Digital Light Processing Stereolithography (DLP-SL) is unnecessarily limiting as applied to microfluidic device fabrication, especially for high-resolution features. This limitation is due primarily to inherent tradeoffs between layer thickness, exposure time, material strength, and optical penetration that can be impossible to satisfy for microfluidic features. We introduce a generalized 3D printing process that significantly expands the accessible spatially distributed optical dose parameter space to enable the fabrication of much higher resolution 3D components without increasing the resolution of the 3D printer. Here we demonstrate component miniaturization in conjunction with a high degree of integration, including 15 mu m x 15 mu m valves and a 2.2 mm x 1.1 mm 10-stage 2-fold serial diluter. These results illustrate our approach's promise to enable highly functional and compact microfluidic devices for a wide variety of biomolecular applications.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available