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. 2017 Apr 27;11(2):024120. doi: 10.1063/1.4982698

FIG. 2.

FIG. 2.

Fabrication process and characteristics of UV-cured PDMS microfluidic chips. (a) Schematic illustration showing the fabrication process of UV-cured PDMS microfluidic chips: (1) casting X-34-4184 mixture on a SU-8 master, (2) curing by exposing to UV, (3) peeling off a replica after 4 h at room temperature, (4) punching to create inlets and outlets, (5) placing the fully cured replica on partially cured X-34-4184, and (6) further curing for 4 h at room temperature to construct UV-cured PDMS microchannels. (b) Photograph of a UV-cured PDMS microfluidic chip with 3 inlets and 1 outlet. Blue ink was injected into microchannels for visualization. The scale bar is 5 mm. (c) Plot of height of a positively patterned microstructure on the SU-8 master, corresponding to the merging microchannel shown in (b). (d) Optical micrographs showing cross-sections of the merging microchannel fabricated with UV-curable (X-34-4184; left) and thermally curable (Sylgard 184; right) PDMS. The x-direction indicates the axis along which the height was measured. The scale bar is 50 μm. (e) Bar graph showing the mean height of the SU-8 master (white) and UV-cured (blue) and thermally cured (gray) PDMS microchannels. The dotted line indicates the height of the SU-8 master. Error bars represent the standard deviation. **** denotes the statistical significance with p < 0.0001.