Laser-based manufacturing of microfluidic devices for reactive transport applications

The high transparency, thermal stability, hardness and chemical resistance of glass often make this material a preferred substrate over silicon and polymers for the manufacturing of microfluidic devices. The conventional manufacturing of glass-based microfluidic devices is a complex, multistep process that involves photolithography, chemical etching, and anodic bonding. This means that the whole fabrication process of microfluidic devices is time consuming and expensive.
In this paper, we investigate a relatively inexpensive laser-based process for the fabrication of enclosed porous network structures in borosilicate glass substrates. The entire process involves only the use of a picosecond pulsed laser both for the generation of microstructures directly on glass and for enclosing these structures with another glass plate. These enclosed microfluidics will be used in near future as customized ‘models’ of subsurface systems for the investigation and the validation of simulations of gas/liquid flow and reactive transport processes occurring in porous media at the pore level.