Surface roughness analysis and improvement of PMMA-based microfluidic chip chambers by CO2 laser cutting

For the microfluidic chip, the surface roughness of the chamber sidewall is an important parameter in estimating its quality. In this work, the chambers of the polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA)-based microfluidic chip were fabricated by CO2 laser cutting, and then the surface roughness of the sections cut using different laser parameters and ambient temperature was studied by a non-contact 3D surface profiler. Our observation shows that the surface roughness results primarily from the residues on the laser-cut edge, which are produced by the bubbles bursting. To reduce the surface roughness of the cut section, a new approach is proposed, that is preheating the PMMA sheet to a suitable ambient temperature during laser processing. The results indicate that at a preheat temperature of 70–90 °C, the surface roughness resulting from the cut would be reduced. In our experiment, the best result was that the arithmetical mean roughness is Ra = 100.86 nm when the PMMA sheet was heated to 85 °C.