3D Printing as a Method for Microfluidic Devices Fabrication

Microfluidic devices play an important role in many biological, chemical, and engineering applications, enabling to manipulate fluids on the microscale level and take advantage of physical laws, such as rapid diffusion and laminar flows. In respect to biological and medical applications, microfluidic technology enables to study cell behavior at the multi-cellular level with a physiological-like experimental conditions. To date, soft lithography is used as the traditional and most common method for microfluidic devices fabrication. In spite of its wide utilization and many advantages, soft lithography has some major disadvantages. It is costly, time consuming and restricted to two-dimensional design. Technological advancements in the field of 3D printing can significantly change the way we use and design microfluidics devices; unlike lithography, it is a single-step fabrication (mold or a complete device), fast and cost effective and most importantly it enables designing and printing of three-dimensional structures that were nearly impossible using soft lithography. Here, we demonstrate the usage of a digital light processing (DLP) 3D printer for the designing and fabricating of molds and complete microfluidic devices.