Polymer-polymer Bonding for Enhanced Functional Micro-Fluidic Chips Fabrication

The low-cost and convenient fabrication of polymer-based microfluidic devices is of great potential for many biomedical and environmental applications. Different microchannel designs are employed for various fluid mixing/separating techniques, such as valving, pumping, centrifugation, and filtration. Polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) is highly attractive for fabricating disposable microfluidic devices because of its transparency, compatibility, robustness, and ease of fabrication. The challenging alignment of expensive, opaque pressure-sensitive adhesive (PSA) layers limits their use for bonding microchip components. Direct polymer-polymer bonding at the chip interface leads to perfectly bonded, transparent, and easily assembled microchips. In this study, microfluidic chips with different sizes of microchannel are fabricated. Six well-defined procedures were investigated for optimizing the polymer bonding between the chip parts. Different solvents, activation techniques (pressure, heat, light), and pre- cleaning