Fast and green: Sustainable rapid-prototyping of microfluidic chips on polylactic acid substrates

This paper reports novel ways to bond bio-based polylactic acid (PLA) substrates for the production of sustainable, single-use, microfluidic components. A laser-based, fast (minutes) fabrication process for multi-layer microfluidic devices in PLA was reported recently but in that report, demonstrator devices were bonded with adhesive tape, which significantly reduced the devices transparency. In this paper, we propose two novel ways to bond PLA substrates, which alleviate the need for adhesives, and enable optimal device transparency.