Polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA) is one of the most important thermoplastic materials and is a widely used material in microfluidics. However, PMMA is usually structured using industrial scale replication processes, such as hot embossing or injection molding, not compatible with rapid prototyping. In this work, we demonstrate that microfluidic chips made from PMMA can be 3D printed using fused deposition modeling (FDM). We demonstrate that using FDM microfluidic chips with a minimum channel cross-section of ~300 µm can be printed and a variety of different channel geometries and mixer structures are shown. The optical transparency of the chips is shown to be significantly enhanced by printing onto commercial PMMA substrates. The use of such commercial PMMA substrates also enables the integration of PMMA microstructures into the printed chips, by first generating a microstructure on the PMMA substrates, and subsequently printing the PMMA chip around the microstructure. We further demonstrate that protein patterns can be generated within previously printed microfluidic chips by employing a method of photobleaching. The FDM printing of microfluidic chips in PMMA allows the use of one of microfluidics’ most used industrial materials on the laboratory scale and thus significantly simplifies the transfer from results gained in the lab to an industrial product.

中文翻译：

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聚甲基丙烯酸甲酯中微流控芯片的熔融沉积建模。

聚甲基丙烯酸甲酯（PMMA）是最重要的热塑性材料之一，并且是微流体中广泛使用的材料。但是，PMMA通常使用工业规模的复制工艺来构造，例如热压花或注塑成型，与快速原型制作不兼容。在这项工作中，我们证明了可以使用熔融沉积建模（FDM）3D打印由PMMA制成的微流控芯片。我们证明了使用最小通道横截面约为300 µm的FDM微流体芯片可以进行印刷，并显示了各种不同的通道几何形状和混合器结构。通过在商用PMMA基板上进行印刷，可以显着提高芯片的光学透明度。使用此类商用PMMA基材还可以将PMMA微观结构整合到印刷芯片中，首先在PMMA基板上产生微结构，然后在微结构周围印刷PMMA芯片。我们进一步证明，通过采用光漂白方法，可以在先前打印的微流控芯片中生成蛋白质模式。PMMA中的微流体芯片的FDM打印允许在实验室规模上使用微流体最常用的一种工业材料，从而大大简化了从实验室获得的结果到工业产品的转移。