Microproduction-based lab-on-a-chip technologies have recently been substantially advanced and have become widely used in various multidisciplinary research fields, including biological, (bio-) chemical, and biomedical fields. A key factor in microproduction is micro tooling. For mass production it is of paramount importance to produce tools from materials with excellent mechanical properties, thus the machining processes need to be able to produce geometrical features smaller than 1 mm in such materials. In this paper, an indirect process chain for production of micromixer and comprising of waterjet (WJ) and abrasive waterjet (AWJ) machining, die-sinking electrical discharge machining (EDM) and casting of polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) is presented. The main source of dimension deviations is WJ machining. AWJ machining performs much better – for the given application the precision is satisfactory, but the kerf width is too large.
Science Journal 