Picosecond laser manufacturing of glass microfluidic devices for the study of fluid flow and reactive transport in porous media

Microfluidic devices can be manufactured from different materials, such as glass, plastic, photoresist or silicon. 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. Unfortunately, conventional manufacturing of glass microfluidic devices is a complex, multistep process that involves the combination of photolithography, chemical etching, and thermal or anodic bonding. This means that the whole fabrication process of microfluidic devices is time consuming and expensive.
During my talk, I will present a different approach for the fabrication of microfluidic devices from glass substrates. The entire fabrication process involves only the use of a picosecond pulsed laser both for: (i) generating microfluidic patterns directly on glass (by ablating the material) and (ii) enclosing these patterns with another glass plate (by welding two glass plates together). The whole manufacturing process can take only a couple of hours which makes this process suitable for rapid prototyping of fully-functional microfluidic devices. Such enclosed microfluidics are planned to be used as customized micromodels of subsurface systems for the investigation of flow and reactive transport of various fluids and minerals in porous media.