Large-strain thermo-mechanical behavior of cyclic olefin copolymers: Application to hot embossing and thermal bonding for the fabrication of microfluidic devices

Amorphous cyclic olefin copolymers (COCs) are beginning to be used for making microfluidic devices for life science applications. Typically, both micro-scale and nano-scale channels are imprinted onto the copolymer by hot embossing. However, optimal manufacturing process conditions will only be possible if the COCs thermo-mechanical behavior is experimentally well characterized, mathematically modeled, and implemented in a numerical simulation. We have conducted large-strain compression experiments on two commercial grades of COCs: TOPAS-8007, and TOPAS-6015 in a wide temperature, and strain rate range. A constitutive theory and numerical implementation developed by Srivastava et al. [1] was applied to model the behavior of TOPAS. We have employed that numerical implementation, together with the material parameters for TOPAS determined here, to predict the response of TOPAS in the following microfluidic fabrication operations: (i) micro-scale hot embossing on TOPAS-8007 to replicate a micro-chip; and (ii) for sealing the channels in the micro-chip: (a) thermal bonding of an embossed chip of TOPAS-8007 with a cover plate of TOPAS-8007; and (b) thermal bonding of an embossed chip of TOPAS-6015 with a cover plate of TOPAS-8007. We show that the model can provide a simulation capability for estimation of the processing parameters for hot embossing and thermal bonding.