Ease fabrication of serpentine microchannel as passive microreactor for nanoparticle production by stereolithography.

Recently, utilization of nanoparticles has been increasing due to their wide range of capability to act as catalyst in chemical reactions, carrier for certain molecules, or additives that would alter certain materials' properties. One way to produce nanoparticles is by utilizing microfluidics technology. Passive micromixing using serpentine microchannel can be utilized to generate nanoparticles in a simple, automated, and high-throughput manner. Here, we design and validate a serpentine microchannel in computational simulation environment prior to realization by stereolithography. The serpentine microchannel has a footprint area of 2 cm x 2 cm with 300 micrometer-wide microchannel. Simulation result shows that the serpentine microchannel is capable of operating under the specified fluid flow parameters. The serpentine microchannel has been successfully realized by stereolithography using standard resin. Metrological measurement shows that the geometrical tolerance is around 18% which is still acceptable for DLP product. Chip assembling is performed by bonding between the serpentine microchannel with rigid transparent acrylic plate. Functional flow test demonstrates the product can perform successfully. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]