A Microfluidic Mixer of High Throughput Fabricated in Glass Using Femtosecond Laser Micromachining Combined with Glass Bonding

Abstract

We demonstrate a microfluidic mixer of high mixing efficiency in fused silica substrate using femtosecond laser-induced wet etching and hydroxide-catalysis bonding method. The micromixer has a three-dimensional geometry, enabling efficient mixing based on Baker’s transformation principle. The cross-sectional area of the fabricated micromixer was 0.5 × 0.5 mm2, enabling significantly promotion of the throughput of the micromixer. The performance of the fabricated micromixers was evaluated by mixing up blue and yellow ink solutions with a flow rate as high as 6 mL/min.

Three-Dimensional Large-Scale Fused Silica Microfluidic Chips Enabled by Hybrid Laser Microfabrication for Continuous-Flow UV Photochemical Synthesis

“…With the embedded mixing units (the same as Fig. 4a) in the chip, the color of the mixing fluids quickly changed into green at the beginning of the entrance of the chip, indicating its highperformance mixing capability with a high throughput manner due to 3D configuration of the chip for manipulation of fluids, which can be also identified in the previous publication [23]. Moreover, by replacing the dye solutions with red and blue solutions, the purple solutions can be quickly obtained as shown in the right panel of Fig.…”

“…However, there are some technical barriers for fabricating long and large-volume microchannels with controllable feature sizes using this technique due to the inherent limitations of ultrafast laser-induced etching selectivity of glass [20][21][22]. Previously, to fabricate 3D centimeter-scale high-throughput micromixers in fused silica glass, a new bonding process was developed [23]. To beat the limitation of the etching selectivity, the introduction of extra-access ports was proposed by several groups before [24][25][26][27].…”

Development of Rapid and High-Precision Colorimetric Device for Organophosphorus Pesticide Detection Based on Microfluidic Mixer Chip

“…The change of the channel width makes the liquid flow perpendicular to the fluid flow direction, and the bending of the microchannel makes the pressure difference inside the liquid. In this case, the method of channel bending and width variation were proposed to improve the mixing efficiency [ 30 , 31 ]. Based on the above principles, two types of microchannel structure were designed, as shown in Figure 4 .…”

Monolithic 3D micromixer with an impeller for glass microfluidic systems

“…44 In addition, the proposed fabrication method does not require a high-temperature bonding process, 56,57 and provides throughput performance five times higher than the maximum flow rate previously reported. 58 Interestingly, the 3DI micromixer showed stable mixing as the impeller rotated faster at a high flow rate. Typical polymer devices using PDMS-to-PDMS bonding or PDMS-toglass bonding have low pressure resistance.…”