Fabrication of a microfluidic chip based on the pure polypropylene material

Abstract

Polypropylene (PP) material has been widely used in the biomedical field for decades due to its high reliability in biochemical reactions. However, a pure PP material microfluidic chip has rarely been reported. Herein, a simple and rapid method has been developed to fabricate a pure PP microfluidic chip by a thermal bonding process using a PP film and PP substrate. An experiment for two-temperature PCR in the pure PP microfluidic system without a pre-treatment process has been successfully carried out. It is shown that the PP microfluidic chip has a high structural strength, tightness for water sealing, and low nonspecific adsorption, which promotes the practical application of microfluidics in the biomedical field. Compared to other existing microfluidic chip technologies, our pure PP material microfluidic chip and its fabrication method have many advantages such as high-speed production rate and extremely low cost. It can be achieved in industrial assembly lines for standardized manufacturing.