A hot embossing robot for bonding microfluidic chips: design, control and test

Dongxu Zhang, Zhenyu Weng, Ya Zhang, Haozheng Dai, Jiageng Wu, Xiaoping Min, Shengxiang Ge

Abstract: The microfluidic technology proposed in recent years has been applied in many fields because of its advantages, such as integration, automation, miniaturization and low cost. Microfluidic chips, which are a realization way for the microfluidic technology, have become a research hotspot and their manufacturing process is studied thoroughly. Bonding is a key step that used for sealing a chip in the manufacturing process, and the bonding quality determines whether the chip can be used in practice. This study developed a hot embossing robot for bonding microfluidic chips: first, the mechanical structure of the robot was designed according to the physical characteristics of microfluidic chips and requirements of the hot embossing process; second, an intelligent temperature control method was established to predict and self-adaptively adjust the operating temperature; at last, multilevel experiments merging engineering and biology were designed and performed. The results showed the great and stabilized bonding effect, and proved the validity and practicability of this hot embossing robot.