CO2 Laser Fabrication and Analysis of a Polystyrene (PS) Microfluidic Chip with a Cantor Fractal Structure
Z. Tian, Z-Y. Wu and X-Y. Chen
A polystyrene (PS) microfluidic chip with Cantor fractal structure is fabricated using CO2 laser system. We study the effects of laser power and laser traverse speed on the depth, width of PS microchannels. Laser power was set from 6 to 14 W and laser traverse speed was set from 6 to 10 mm/s in the experiments. A number of experiments were carried out to find the appropriate parameters in the range of the set parameters for the CO2 laser machining of microchannels. Hot pressing bonding technology was used to integrate the PS cover plate and the PS substrate. The work shows that CO2 laser processing is a low cost, fast, convenient and high precision microfluidic chip processing method. The microfluidic chip with Cantor fractal made of PS material can achieve better mixing effect. Using our method, we can process a minimum width of 20 μm and a minimum depth of 15 μm microchannel, which provides effective help to the micron level microchannels that we processed.
Keywords: CO2 laser, polystyrene (PS), laser power, laser traverse speed, hot bonding, Cantor fractal structure, microfluidic