Technology innovations in 3-D wax based microfluidic device fabrication

This paper reports two new wax based microfluidic device printing technologies (Figure 1). Utilizing a contact based wax extrusion printing tip, a series of microfluidic serial dilution devices were created both on a 2D and 3D plane (Figure 2). Baselining the performance of the systems, the wax printed devices were compared to that of one created using the traditional photolithographic method. Advantages to this technology is that it is low cost, enables rapid microfluidic device prototyping, environmentally friendly, and most importantly allows for the passage into a new field of 3D microfluidic applications.