On the impact of the fabrication method on the performance of 3D printed mixers

Abstract

Awide variety of 3D printing technologies have been used for the fabrication of lab-on-a-chip (LOC) devices in recent years. Despite the large number of studies having examined the use of 3D printing technologies in microf luidic devices, the effect of the fabrication method on their performance has received little attention. In this paper, a comparison is shown between unibody-LOC micro-mixers, a particular type of monolithic design for 3D printed LOCs, fabricated in polyjet, stereolithography (SLA) and fused deposition modelling (FDM or FFF) platforms, paying particular attention to the inherent limitations of each fabrication platform and how these affect the performance of the manufactured devices.