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Creative Biolabs provides flexible and reliable design, manufacturing and development services of polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) microfluidic systems. In addition to the proven general-purpose PDMS chip products, we also provide silicon, SU-8 or metal mold design and development services for PDMS rapid production.

Silicone Elastomer

Silicone elastomer refers to a polymer material that undergoes significant deformation under weak stress and quickly returns to its original state and size after stress relaxation. Inexpensive, biocompatible, and easy-to-process PDMS has become an ideal material for low-cost microfluidic chips. Depending on the size of the monomer chain, the non-crosslinked PDMS is liquid or semi-solid, and after the crosslinking agent is mixed and cured, it will form a hydrophobic elastomer.

Table.1 Key physical characteristics of Silicone Elastomer.

Advantages of PDMS Chips

As the most commonly used substrate material for microfluidic systems, PDMS chips have the following advantages:

• Low-cost, PDMS raw materials and supporting curing agents can be easily obtained.
• Compared with other materials, PDMS has the simplest processing procedure. It can be quickly reproduced with common laboratory equipment after obtaining the mold.
• PDMS can maintain a liquid state for dozens of hours even after the curing agent is mixed.
• PDMS can easily reach micron-scale structural accuracy by high-resolution printing, the optimized molding protocol can even shape structures with nano-scale.
• PDMS is highly transparent at conventional optical frequencies and produces extremely low autofluorescence, suitable for optical detection and visual observation.
• PDMS has good biocompatibility with almost no biotoxicity.
• After plasma treatment, PDMS can be tightly combined with other materials and assembled into a multilayer chip structure.
• PDMS has good gas permeability and ensures the control of the gas composition in the channel without direct contact with the liquid inside the channel.
• PDMS is elasticity, which makes on-chip microvalve, micropump and other structures possible.
• Low surface energy so that PDMS can be easily removed from the hydrophobic surface.
• PDMS can be easily sealed on other substrate materials reversibly or irreversibly by thin film bonding or surface plasma treatment.

Fig 1. Fabrication of PDMS chip. (Creative Biolabs)

It is worth noting that some inherent disadvantages of PDMS chips must also be taken into consideration when you choose chip processing materials.

• PDMS has limited stiffness. As the softest substrate among conventional materials, PDMS has more unpredictability, the limited depth-to-aspect ratio of structures, and structures may collapse when the model is peeled off in the laboratory. Nonetheless, you can still trust that our precision machining technology and well-trained staff can perfectly reproduce the micron-scale structure in the PDMS channel.
• The thermodynamic properties of PDMS make it impossible to directly evaporate metal electrodes on PDMS. Nonetheless, an optimized hybrid craft allows us to deposit electrodes on glass or silicon wafers and assemble them into PDMS channels.
• PDMS is extremely susceptible to organic solvents, especially in experiments involving chloroform, diethyl ether, and diisopropylamine.

Property Adjustment of PDMS

The property of PDMS is highly flexible, researchers can modify and optimize the elasticity, transparency, photothermal effect, refractive index, and electrical conductivity of their PDMS devices according to specific needs. Elasticity and stiffness can be controlled by adjusting the curing agent/substrate ratio and designing curing conditions, while other physical properties can be changed by adding molecules or materials as fillers during curing and fabricating. The surface of PDMS exposed to oxygen ions will generate a layer of nano-scale -OH groups to achieve temporary (about half an hour) activation. These performance adjustment and surface functionalization strategies have greatly improved the surface properties and application potential of PDMS.

Services

Equipped with complete microfluidic chip fabrication equipment and abundant processing technology, Creative Biolabs provides the most elegant and effective solutions for the design and fluid management of PDMS lab-on-chip devices. Here, you may directly obtain PDMS chip products with various functions, or share your design or requirements to entrust us in developing and manufacturing. Our precision manufacturing platform is capable of creating PDMS microchannels with dimensions between 5 and 500 µm and provides you with perfectly structured high-resolution chips. We also provide silicon, glass, SU-8 or metal molds for PDMS chip manufacturing, with which you can fabricate chips yourself in the laboratory within a few hours. In addition, we also provide a series of back-end work including surface modification and functionalization, chip sealing, reagent pre-embedding, etc. If you want to obtain microfluidic chips with special functions for experiments with cost-effectiveness, our PDMS fabrication platform will be your best choice. Please don't hesitate to contact us to discuss your need and for more information.

For Research Use Only. Not For Clinical Use.