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.