Principal Investigator Jung-Hoon Chun
Large scale manufacturing for microfluidics is still in its infancy, but in recent years there has been a shift from materials and equipment typically used for semiconductor fabrication, to polymers and polymer processing. The eventual goal of polymer processing is to mass manufacture economically, but today polymers are more often chosen for their material properties than for their manufacturabilty. The ability to use and combine a range of polymers is essential to keep polymer processing attractive for design, yet many are orders of magnitude more compliant than glass or silicon and need to be handled differently. Semiconductor equipment used for wafer bonding and alignment are no longer adequate many polymers. My research is focused on identifying the factors that make compliant materials difficult to align to one another, and their consequential limitation to alignment accuracy.