Options
2002
Conference Paper
Titel
Laser structuring and modification of surfaces for medical and micro chemical components
Abstract
In the production of micro devices the surface properties become more and more important for chemistry and biotechnology with respect to surface wetting, fluidic characteristic and biochemical properties for micro reactors, biochemical miniaturized devices for DNA- and proteome analysis and medical micro implants. In all that cases specific surface properties has to be set to conduct fluids and cells. Plasma treatment and co-polymerisation are well used for large area applications but have limited access to small geometries. For this applications newly designed laser technologies for surface processing have been developed to manipulate the fluidic surface properties even for channel sizes < 100 µm. The technology is based on excimer-laser treatment of polymer surfaces using laser wavelength < 200 nm with different fluences and cumulated energies. Depending on the processing parameters and used polymers either hydrophobe of hydrophil surfaces can be produced. In ideal cases the wetting angles can be increased from 90 deg C to almost 140 deg C so that the surface acts with the so called lotus effect. This effect has been used as guiding aids for cells on medical micro-implants leading the cells to grow along desired directions. Typical results for cell growing experiments are shown for different polymers.