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The relationship between the Young’s modulus and dry etching rate of polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS)

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Abstract

Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) has been the pivotal materials for microfluidic technologies with tremendous amount of lab-on-a-chip devices made of PDMS microchannels. While molding-based soft-lithography approach has been extremely successful in preparing various PDMS constructs, some complex features have to been achieved through more complicated microfabrication techniques that involve dry etching of PDMS. Several recipes have been reported for reactive ion etching (RIE) of PDMS; however, the etch rates present large variations, even for the same etching recipe, which poses challenges in adopting this process for device fabrication. Through systematic characterization of the Young’s modulus of PDMS films and RIE etch rate, we show that the etch rate is closely related to the polymer cross-link density in the PDMS with a higher etch rate for a lower PDMS Young’s modulus. Our results could provide guidance to the fabrication of microfluidic devices involving dry etching of PDMS.

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Acknowledgements

M.F. and D.L. acknowledge a helpful discussion with Dr. Godfrey Saudi. The authors acknowledge the financial support from the National Institutes of Health (Grants Number: 1R21EY026176, 1R01 EY027729), and from National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Grant Number: 80NSSC18K1165), which is a fellowship award to Matthew Fitzgerald under the NASA Space Technology Research Fellowships program.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, 37235, USA

    Matthew L. Fitzgerald, Sara Tsai, Leon M. Bellan & Deyu Li

  2. The Vanderbilt Eye Institute and Vanderbilt Brain Institute, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, TN, 37232, USA

    Rebecca Sappington

  3. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, 37235, USA

    Yaqiong Xu

  4. Department of Physics and Astronomy, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, 37235, USA

    Yaqiong Xu

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  1. Matthew L. Fitzgerald
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  2. Sara Tsai
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  3. Leon M. Bellan
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  4. Rebecca Sappington
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  5. Yaqiong Xu
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  6. Deyu Li
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Correspondence to Deyu Li.

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Fitzgerald, M.L., Tsai, S., Bellan, L.M. et al. The relationship between the Young’s modulus and dry etching rate of polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS). Biomed Microdevices 21, 26 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10544-019-0379-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10544-019-0379-8

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