Design and fabrication of polymer microfluidic substrates using the optical disc process

This paper presents a new method for manufacturing a microfluidic structure on a polymer-based substrate. The method uses a new optical disc process to prevent damage on the mirror plate of the mold. In addition, the cycle time of the injection molding can be reduced several ten-folds compared to the conventional methods by means of a new cooling system. The molding system is comprised of a mold insert (stamper) holder and vacuum system to join the mold insert with the mold. As a result the time to change the mold insert is drastically decreased. Our proposed method has the ability to reduce the time required to insert the mold from several hours to a few minutes, prevent damage on the mirror plate of the mold, and decrease the cycle time of injection molding from several minutes to 5-8 s. The experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed method is suitable to be applied to mass production.