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Updated: Jul 10, 2026
Large-area Scanning Probe Nanolithography Facilitated by Automated Alignment and Its Application to Substrate Fabrication for Cell Culture Studies
Published on: June 12, 2018
Microfabrication procedure of PDMS microbeam array using photolithography for laminin printing and piconewton force
F Mert Sasoglu1, Andrew J Bohl, Bradley E Layton
1Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA.
Abstract:
The purpose of this paper is to introduce our design for transducing forces on the order of tens of piconewtons by optically measuring deflection of a microfabricated beam tip as it pulls on an array of flexible structures such as axons in an array of laminin-printed neurons. To achieve this we have designed polymeric beams with spring constants on the order of 10 pN/microm. We have fabricated circular microbeams with Sylgard polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS). The elastic modulus of PDMS was determined experimentally using a microscale and a micrometer at different concentrations of curing agent and base agent and found to be on the order of 100 kPa. The designed geometry is a 100x100 tapered microcone array with each beam having a length of 100 microm, and a base diameter of 10 microm. A SU-8 negative photoresist is etched using photolithography and used as a mold for PDMS soft lithography. PDMS was injected into the mold and the array peeled from the mold.
