Facile single step fabrication of microchannels with varying size

Abstract

In this report, we present a non-lithographic embedded template method for rapid and cost-effective fabrication of a monolithic microfluidic device with channels of various sizes. The procedure presented here enables the preparation of microchannels with varying dimensions in a single device without using any sophisticated micromachining instrumentation. In addition, this non-lithographic technique has also been used to fabricate a multilayer-multilevel biopolymer microdevice in a single step. To demonstrate the versatility of the presented method, we have fabricated microfluidic devices with four different materials under different curing/cross linking conditions. We have also demonstrated the application of the fabricated device to generate structured copper alginate microbeads, in vitro protein synthesis in three phase flow, and alternate plugs with liquid spacers.