Surface-Driven Capillary Flow of the Dyed Aqueous Ethanol in a single SU-8 based Glass Microfluidic Device integrated with the Arrays of Square Polyimide Micropillars

Abstract

In this work, a single SU-8 based glass microfluidic device is fabricated by the maskless lithography and indirect bonding technique. A particular polyimide layer at the selected portions and the arrays of square polyimide micropillars at the other portions are integrated on the microchannel bottom wall by the maskless lithography. Dyed aqueous ethanol (70% dyed water, 30% ethanol) is prepared as the working liquid in this work. A CMOS camera catching 25 frames per second with a corresponding time-scale resolution of 0.04 second is used to record the surface-driven microfluidic flow inside the fabricated device. A nearly convex meniscus profile is recorded. In future, this work will be helpful to fabricate the SU-8 based microfluidic laboratory-on-a-chip systems integrated with polyimide microstructures towards the bioengineering applications.