Fabrication of Micro-channels using CO2 LASER Machining & Soft Lithography for Lab-on-Chip Applications

Microchannels are one of the most significant parts for the Lab-on-Chip applications. The microchannels fabrication is a crucial task. The Soft Lithography is one of the most favored methods of microchannel fabrication. The use of CO₂ LASER machining for microchannel fabrication using Acrylic sheet is studied in this paper. The experimentation is carried out to see the effect of LASER scanning speed and laser power on the depth of the microchannel mold. It has observed that the channel depth is increasing linearly with increasing LASER power and decreasing with increase in speed. The straight microchannel configuration with Y shaped inlet having circular & elliptical obstacles has been fabricated using CO₂ laser machining on acrylic sheet. Also, the fabricated molds are used to prepare the further microchannel molds using the Soft Lithography technique and then the microchannels prepared from Soft Lithography are used as a mold for the lab-on-chip applications like check the mixing length & mixing phenomenon etc.