Low Cost Manufacturing Process of Y-Channel Active Microfluidic Mixing Device Using 3D Printing Machine

Microfluidic devices are rapidly used for its effective mixing capabilities in sub-micron level fluid particles for drug development, biomedical diagnostics, and cell culture, etc. In terms of external action, microfluidic devices can be categorized as active mixers and passive mixers. Active mixers are those which require external forces to stimulate the fluid particles in order to get a quick and rapid mixing to enhance the diffusion and mixing process. In the case of passive mixers, microchannel configuration is designed in such a way; for example, by optimizing the contact area or contact time or even both to enhance the mixing quality, in that case, no external means are used for enhancement. Acoustic/Ultrasonic, Dielectrophoretic, Electrokinetic time pulsed, Electrohydrodynamic, Thermal actuation, Magneto-hydrodynamic flow, etc. are some types of active micromixer. Among all of these, we are focusing on electrokinetically driven active micromixers which use mostly AC electroosmosis and Dielectrophoresis as the external force to mix fluids utilizing the chaotic advection. The process mostly used for fabricating microchannels in the micromixers is soft lithography which is a costly process and requires a clean room facility. Another constrain of this method is there is less flexibility in changing the dimensions of microfluidic channels keeping the same configuration and geometry. In the case of repeatability, there is little chance to get the same manufactured product multiple times with precision. In this poster, our focus is to present the steps of manufacturing the Y-Channel active microfluidic mixing device using a 3D printing machine and the mold of the same device without altering any parameter to make it useable for other materials and also analysis the cost of manufacturing. For this purpose, we used a CAD tool to draw the microfluidic channel with a precise dimension. The brighter side of using a CAD tool is that the dimensions and orientations can be changed and manipulated keeping the same design configuration. The drawings were saved in a particular file format so that it could be opened in slicing software. In our case, we used Chitubox (V:1.6.3) as the slicing software. The purpose of using the slicing software is to configure the amount of material, UV ray exposure time, dimensioning the drawing, and adjust the printing time by optimizing the amount of material per unit time. The time of printing is dependent on the dimension of the object to be printed and the printing material. Considering the dimension of microfluidic devices, usually, less than half an hour is taken. Resin is the material we used for printing. In our design, we also made grooves for inserting electrodes in the mixing region. Finally, the cost of manufacturing was estimated using the slicing software by analyzing the unit cost and the amount of material of the object.