High-grade optical polydimethylsiloxane for microfluidic applications

Commercially available polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) elastomers, such as Sylgard 184® are widely used in soft lithography and for microfluidic applications. These PDMS elastomers contain fillers to enhance their mechanical stability. The reinforcing fillers, often sub-micrometer small SiO(2) particles, tend to aggregate, swell with water, and thereby become cognoscible in a way that can strongly interfere with the visualization of micro-scale events taking place next to PDMS structures. As PDMS microfluidics are often used for studying cells and micro-/nanoparticles and for creating/handling nanodroplets, it has become highly desirable to employ a PDMS having high optical quality and that allows microscopy observation without artifacts. Here, we present a PDMS formulation that is free of fillers and has sufficiently low viscosity to perform a filtration step of the mixed prepolymers before curing. By molding a bi-layer microfluidic network (MFN), composed of a thin filler-free PDMS layer and a thicker Sylgard 184® backing layer, PDMS MFNs featuring both high optical quality and mechanical stability, can be fabricated.