Adhesive bonding strategies to fabricate high-strength and transparent 3D printed microfluidic device

Recently, the use of 3D printing technologies has become prevalent in microfluidic applications. Although these technologies enable low-cost, rapid, and easy fabrication of microfluidic devices, fabricated devices suffer from optical opaqueness that inhibits their use for microscopic imaging. This study investigates bonding strategies using polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) and printer resin as interlayer materials to fabricate high-strength optically transparent 3D-printed microfluidic devices. First, we fabricated microfluidic structures using a stereolithography 3D printer. We placed 3D-printed structures on interlayer materials coated surfaces. Then, we either let these 3D-printed structures rest on the coated slides or transferred them to new glass slides. We achieved bonding between 3D-printed structures and glass substrates with UV exposure for resin and with elevated temperature for PDMS interlayer materials. Bonding strength was investigated for different interlayer material thicknesses. We also analyzed the bright-field and fluorescence imaging capability of microfluidic devices fabricated using different bonding strategies. We achieve up to twofold (9.1 bar) improved bonding strength and comparable fluorescence sensitivity with respect to microfluidic devices fabricated using the traditional plasma activated PDMS-glass bonding method. Although stereolithography 3D printer allows fabrication of enclosed channels having dimensions down to ∼600 μm, monolithic transparent microfluidic channels with 280 × 110 μm² cross section can be realized using adhesive interlayers. Furthermore, 3D-printed microfluidic chips can be integrated successfully with Protein-G modified substrates using resin interlayers for detection of fluorescent-labeled immunoglobulin down to ∼30 ng/ml. Hence, this strategy can be applied to fabricate high-strength and transparent microfluidic chips for various optical imaging applications including biosensing.