Processing and Profile Control of Microhole Array for PDMS Mask with Femtosecond Laser

Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) is hailed as one of the foundational materials that have been applied to different products in various fields because of its chemical resistance, low cost, excellent flexibility, and high molding capability. With the aim to achieve surface texture with high efficiency by means of electrochemical micromachining with PDMS mask, a femtosecond laser is utilized to process a precision array of micro-through-holes on PDMS films as the molds. The ablation process of PDMS with a femtosecond laser was investigated via numerical simulation verified with experiments indicating a laser energy density of 4.865 mJ/mm² as the ablation threshold of PDMS with the melting temperature of 930 K. The spiral scanning path with optimized radial offset was developed to ablate materials from the PDMS film to form the laminated profiles, and a tapered through hole was then formed with multilayer scanning. The profile dimension and accuracy were examined as control targets in terms of laser pulse energy and scanning speed, showing that a 12 μJ femtosecond laser pulse energy and 1000 mm/s scanning speed could bring about a nearly circular laminating profile with expected smaller exit diameter than the entry diameter. All the cross-section diameters of the microcone decreased with the increase of laser scanning speed, while the taper increased gradually and then saturated around a laser scanning speed of 800 mm/s due to the energy absorption resulting in smaller ablation in diameter and depth.