Rapid Prototyping of Microfluidic Devices with Stereolithographic 3D Printing

Area of Science:

• Biomedical Engineering
• Additive Manufacturing
• Microfluidics

Background:

• 3D printing offers design flexibility for biomedical devices.
• Traditional microfluidic chip fabrication is complex and expensive.
• Current 3D printing methods yield low-quality molds, limiting microfluidic chip development.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a simple 3D printing procedure for high-fidelity microfluidic molds.
• To reduce surface roughness and improve dimensional accuracy of 3D printed molds.
• To demonstrate the utility of these molds for rapid microfluidic device prototyping.

Main Methods:

• Utilized stereolithography (SLA) 3D printing with a commercial photopolymer resin.
• Developed a streamlined post-print processing workflow for SLA molds.
• Fabricated polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) microfluidic chips using the processed molds.

Main Results:

• Achieved microfluidic chips with feature dimensions as low as 75 μm.
• 3D printed molds exhibited high dimensional fidelity to CAD designs.
• Reduced average surface roughness of molds to < 3 μm.

Conclusions:

• The developed SLA printing and post-processing strategy enables efficient fabrication of high-quality microfluidic molds.
• This method significantly improves accessibility and speed for microfluidic device prototyping.
• Successfully demonstrated the platform's utility by prototyping an extracellular vesicle (EV)-exchange chip.