PDMSers

i heard a great idea to solve this problem yesterday, but unfortunately
i have no references or design.  design the microfluidic such that it
can be sealed by vaccum to the substrate.  similar to a suction cup.

adrian

jgrogan@seas.upenn.edu wrote:

>I was wondering if anyone has noticed something curious about bonding PDMS to
>glass. Typically, before bonding my PDMS structure to a glass slide, I clean
>the slide with acetone, IPA, DI water and then bake dry. Then I put my slide
>and PDMS in O2 plasma for 10 sec at 30 W and I get rock solid bonds. But, there
>were a couple instances where the slide was especially dirty, so I tried
>cleaning it by itself in 02 plasma for 2-3min at 300W. When that was done, I
>went through the standard bonding procedure with PDMS and found there to be no
>bonding whatsoever (it was worse than before the cleaning). Apparently, the
>strong plasma makes the glass "too clean" and inert to PDMS bonding.
>
>This turned out to be a major source of trouble for me when I first tried
>bonding PDMS because I was over cleaning the slides. I was wondering if anyone
>else has noticed this sensitivity with glass cleaning and if there's any way
>to "roughen up" the glass surface again after a slide has been cleaned.