A novel fabrication technique to minimize poly(dimethylsiloxane)-microchannels deformation under high-pressure operation

PDMS is one of the most common materials used for the flow delivery in the microfluidics chips, since it is clear, inert, nontoxic, and nonflammable. Its inexpensiveness, straightforward fabrication, and biological compatibility have made it a favorite material in the exploratory stages of the bio-microfluidic devices. If small footprint assays want to be performed while keeping the throughput, high pressure-rated channels should be used, but PDMS flexibility causes an important issue since it can generate a large variation of microchannel geometry. In this work, a novel fabrication technique based on the prevention of PDMS deformation is developed. A photo-sensible thiolene resin (Norland Optical Adhesive 63, NOA 63) is used to create a rigid coating layer over the stiff PDMS micropillar array, which significantly reduces the pressure-induced shape changes. This method uses the exact same soft lithography manufacturing equipment. The verification of the presented technique was investigated experimentally and numerically and the manufactured samples showed a deformation 70% lower than PDMS conventional samples.