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A new simple and fast thermally-solvent assisted method to bond PMMA–PMMA in micro-fluidics devices

A rapid and simple thermally-solvent assisted method of bonding was introduced for poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) based microfluidic substrates. The technique is a low-temperature (68 °C), and rapid (15 min) bonding technique; in addition, only a fan-assisted oven with some paper clamps are used. Two different solvents (ethanol and isopropyl alcohol) with two different methods of cooling (one-step and three steps) were employed to determine the best solvent and method of cooling (residual stresses may be released in different cooling methods) by considering bonding strength and quality. In this bonding technique, a thin film of solvent between two PMMA sheets disperses tends to dissolve a thin film of PMMA sheet surface, then evaporate, and finally reconnect monomers of the PMMA sheets at the specific operating temperature. The operating temperature of this method comes from the coincidence of the solubility parameter graph of PMMA with the solubility parameter graph of the solvents. Different tests such as tensile strength test, deformation test, leakage tests, and surface characteristics tests were performed to find the optimum conditions for this bonding strategy. The best bonding quality and the highest bonding strength (28.47 MPa) occurred when 70% isopropyl alcohol solution was employed with the one-step cooling method. Furthermore, the bonding reversibility was taken into account and critical percentages for irreversible bonding were obtained for both of the solvents and methods. This method provides a perfect bonding quality for PMMA substrates, and can be used in laboratories without needing any expensive and special instruments, because of its merits such as lower bonding time, lower-cost, and higher strength etc in comparison with the majority of other common bonding techniques.