This microfluidic device (illuminated by ultraviolet light was 3D printed in Purdue’s Additive and Intelligent Manufacturing Lab using Huachao Mao’s technology. [Photo by John O’Malley at Purdue University]
The patent-pending innovation developed by Huachao Mao and his team requires no high-end equipment or cleanroom environment.
Mao, an assistant professor of engineering technology in the Purdue Polytechnic Institute, and his team are fabricating economical multilevel microfluidic devices as small as 10 microns deep (one-tenth of the diameter of a human hair) and 100 microns wide.
Mao and his team utilized vat photopolymerization (VPP) to improve upon traditional fabrication methods and 3D printing. These methods can prove costly and time-consuming, with several steps and high-end equipment and environments needed.
“VPP allows for the direct fabrication of highly transparent microfluidics with a much higher resolution, allowing for channels as narrow as 100 microns,” Mao said in a post on the university’s website. “An emerging method within VPP is the use of liquid crystal display (LCD) technology, which uses ultraviolet light to facilitate the photopolymer solidification process.”
Mao says the team successfully printed a microfluidic channel that can form a single line of cancer cells when these cells flow through it. This, he says, demonstrates the technology’s potential in cell analysis. By precisely controlling fluid flow and reaction conditions at the microliter or nanoliter scale, the microfluidic devices can accelerate biomedical research, improve the accuracy and speed of diagnostic tests, and enable portable testing solutions across diverse fields.
Additionally, Mao and the team fabricated complex networks of microfluidic channels that mimic connection in the capillary. They also expanded the approach to 3D printing the devices with channels on curved surfaces. Next, they aim to bridge 3D printed microfluidic devices with conventional 2D microfluidics.
