A Process Study on 3D Printing of Polymethyl Methacrylate Microfluidic Chips for Chemical Engineering

Microfluidic technology is an emerging interdisciplinary field that use micropipes to handle or manipulate tiny fluids in chemistry, fluid physics, microelectronics, new materials and biomedical engineering. As one of the rapid prototyping methods, three-dimensional (3D) printing technique with rapid and cost-effective and integrated molding characteristics has became one of the important manufacturing technologies of microfluidic chip. Polymethyl-methacrylate (PMMA), as an exceptional thermoplastic material, has found widespread application in the field of microfluidics. This paper presented a comprehensive process research on the fabrication of fused deposition modeling (FDM) 3D printing PMMA microfluidic chips (chips), encompassing finite element numerical analysis studies, orthogonal process parameter optimization experiments, and the application of 3D printing integrated microfluidic reactors in the reaction between copper ions and ammonia water. In the work, the thermal stress finite element model shown the printing platform temperature was a significant printing parameters to prevent warping and delamination in the 3D printing process. And a single printing molding technique was employed to fabricate microfluidic chips with square cross-sectional dimensions reduced to 200 μm, and the microchannels exhibited no clogging or leakage. The orthogonal experiment method of 3D printing PMMA microchannels was carried out, and the optimized printing parameters resulted in a reduction of the microchannel profile to Ra 1.077μm. Finally, a set of chemical reaction experiments of copper ions and ammonia water were performed in a 3D printed microreactor. And color datum graph of copper hydroxide were obtained. This works provided a cheap and high-quality research method for the future research in water quality detection and chemical engineering.