Fully inkjet-printed microfluidics: A solution to low-cost rapid three-dimensional microfluidics fabrication with numerous electrical and sensing applications

Abstract

As the needs for low-cost rapidly-produced microfluidics are growing with the trend of Lab-on-a-Chip and distributed healthcare, the fully inkjet-printing of microfluidics can be a solution to it with numerous potential electrical and sensing applications. Inkjet-printing is an additive manufacturing technique featuring no material waste and a low equipment cost. Moreover, similar to other additive manufacturing techniques, inkjet-printing is easy to learn and has a high fabrication speed, while it offers generally a great planar resolution down to below 20 μm and enables flexible designs due to its inherent thin film deposition capabilities. Due to the thin film feature, the printed objects also usually obtain a high vertical resolution (such as 4.6 μm). This paper introduces a low-cost rapid three-dimensional fabrication process of microfluidics, that relies entirely on an inkjet-printer based single platform and can be implemented directly on top of virtually any substrates.