Rapid fabrication of a four-layer PMMA-based microfluidic chip using CO2-laser micromachining and thermal bonding

A smart design method to transform the original two-layer microfluidic chip into a four-layer 3D microfluidic chip is proposed. A novel fabrication method is established to rapidly and effectively produce a four-layer microfluidic chip device made entirely from polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA). Firstly, the CO2-laser cuts the PMMA sheets by melting and blowing away vaporized material from the parent material to obtain high-quality channels of the microfluidic chip. An orthogonal experimental method is used to study its processing stability. In addition, a simple, rapid thermal bonding technique is successfully applied in fabricating the four-layer microfluidic chip, which has a bond strength of 1.3 MPa. A wooden pole is used to improve the accuracy of the alignment. Finally, a mixing experiment with blue ink and water is carried out, which proves that this smart design method and rapid manufacturing technology are successful.