I am presenting the instruments/facilities that we use in our microfluidic/nanofluidics instrumentation laboratory. We primarily fabricate glass based microfluidic devices ourselves and use them for different biological applications.
1. We have a basic photolithography setup that includes a dark room, UV light source and developing solution.
2. Then we perform wet chemical etching to make channel networks on the substrate glass plate using BOE (buffered oxide etchant) which is an appropriate mixture of HF and NH4F.
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| Chemical wet etching setup |
The BOE solution is heated to certain temp to fasten the etching rate and stirred continuously to have uniform etching. The solution on the right is Chromium etchant which removes chromium layer from the substrate plate.
3. Sand blaster is used to make holes to have access to the channels. It uses 25-50 micron sand particles which are bombarded on the surface of glass substrate. It makes holes of ~1mm diameter.
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| Sand blaster to make holes |
