SU-8- and PDMS-based hybrid fabrication technology for combination of permanently bonded flexible and rigid features on a single device
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, a novel hybrid fabrication technology is presented that uses both a flexible polymer (polydimethylsiloxane-–PDMS) and a rigid polymer (SU-8). A covalent bond between the flexible and rigid polymer layers is achieved using an oxygen plasma treatment during a layer-by-layer direct spin-on process. Precise alignment of the features in each layer and a highly repeatable method are achieved by this new process. As a proof-of-concept, we successfully fabricated PDMS-based flexible microfluidic devices with SU-8-based rigid world-to-chip/chip-to-world interconnects. The bond strength between the PDMS and SU-8 layers is measured by three methods: (1) Instron® microtester to pull apart the layers; (2) voice coil actuator to test the bond between interconnects and the substrate; and (3) microfluidic pressurization test to evaluate the bond strength along the channels. The bond strength between the flexible PDMS layer and the rigid SU-8 features is very strong; the bond between these two polymers does not fail during these evaluations although the integrity of the PDMS layer itself fails during the microtester evaluation. Additionally, the layer-by-layer direct spin-on process resulted in a repeatable process and precise alignment of the features in each layer, which are necessary in order to achieve consistent performance from the fabricated devices. The rigid SU-8 interconnects fabricated onto a flexible PDMS device serve as a world-to-chip/chip-to-world interconnects for the direct connection with Tygon® tubing. Three different designs of hybrid (PDMS and SU-8 based) microfluidic devices are designed, fabricated and tested. Each variation differed in the microchannel design in order to demonstrate the versatility of the process to make devices on multiple scales and patterns. These hybrid microfluidic devices are capable of functioning without leakage up to pressures of 85.85 ±3.56 kPa. Although microfluidic channels with interconnects are shown as a proof-of-concept, the fabrication process demonstrated herein could be utilized to develop a number of more sophisticated microfluidic and biomedical devices.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".