Short Experimental Report on Lithographic Technique in Microfluidics

Subhadeep Mukhopadhyay

Abstract

In this experimental work, a single SU-8 based glass microfluidic device is fabricated by the maskless lithography and indirect bonding technique. The sealing by indirect bonding technique is perform during the hard baking in maskless lithography. Dyed ethylene glycol is prepared as the working liquid. A CMOS camera catching 25 frames per second with a corresponding time-scale resolution of 0.04 second is used to record the surface-driven microfluidic flow of dyed ethylene glycol. In future, this work may be useful to manipulate the working liquid inside the SU-8 based laboratory-on-a-chip systems. Liquid-microflow is slower at higher surface-area to volume ratio inside the microchannel. The surface-to-volume ratio is generally very high inside any Nanochannel. Therefore, the Liquid-flow may be stopped before the Nanochannel. Hence, only gas-Nanoflow may happen inside the Nanochannel producing the subject of Nanofluidics. Therefore, this work may be useful to manipulate the working gas inside the SU-8 based nanofluidic laboratory-on-a-chip systems. During practical experimentations in future, it may be observed that SU-8 would not be the most suitable polymer to fabricate the nanochannel. Then, appropriate channel materials should be searched at the initial phase of experimentations on gas nanoflow.

Abstract

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