Digital microfluidics (DMF) is an emerging technology for liquid-handling of picoliter- to microliter-sized droplets. It enables individual control over droplets by applying electrical fields to an array of electrodes. Standard DMF devices include four key components: substrates, electrodes, a dielectric layer and hydrophobic layers. This work outlines the fabrication of dielectric layers with a high relative permittivity by inkjet printing. The layers consists of OrmoComp, silver nanoparticles and different solvents. OrmoComp has a relative permittivity of about 2.5. By adding 24.2 vol% of silver nanoparticles the relative permittivity rises to 76. Thereby the operating voltage can be reduced drastically.
The contribution describes the inkjet printing of 3D-optical components and systems, based on the hybrid polymer ORMOCER®, which exhibits not only good optical, but also excellent stability parameters versus environmental conditions such as temperature or radiation. With repeating the printing and UV-curing of single printed layers multiple times, a 3D-shape is formed out of thousands of individual layers. To increase the transmission of the 3D-printed optics a tailored AR-plas® one-step plasma treatment was developed. By varying the plasma parameters, the increase of transmission can be tailored within the whole visible spectrum and thus the overall transmission can be increased from 90% to more than 97%. This ensures the additive manufacturing of individualized 3D-optics with very high performance.
Micro-lens array manufacturing by using an inkjet printing technology allows for the manufacturing of large area arrays on lithographically structured substrates that contain oleophobic and oleophilic surface patterns. An inkjet printing process deposits the high performance, hybrid polymer ORMOCER on the oleophilic pattern. The material forms by means of surface tension and wetting boundaries a lens shape, while the inkjet printing process itself enables for a highly parallel manufacturing of many lenses at the same time. A typical geometrical deviation <2% of the radius of curvature for lenses with diameters of <1 mm, ROC’s of ca. <2 mm and sag heights of <100 microns was achieved. Also a specific lithography processing regime was derived that combines wetting patterns with optical apertures to enable advanced illumination setups like multi-aperture projection.
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