Polymer Overmoulding for Microfluidic Device Packaging and System Integration

Packaging of microfluidics receives relatively little academic attention, and most published work concerns the facilitation of prototyping rather than schemes suitable for volume production. A new packaging method for microfluidic devices is proposed, of polymer overmoulding to form a fluidic manifold integrated with the device in a single step. The anticipated advantages of the proposed method of packaging are ease of assembly and low part count, making it suitable for low cost, high volume manufacturing. The work reported here is an investigation into the fundamental materials and process issues determining the feasibility of the proposed packaging method.