Mechanical characterization of bulk Sylgard 184 for microfluidics and microengineering

By I. D. Johnston, D. McCluskey, C. Tan, M. Tracey. 2014

1,412 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) elastomers are extensively used for soft lithographic replication of microstructures in microfluidic and micro-engineering applications. Elastomeric microstructures are commonly required to fulfil an explicit mechanical role and accordingly their mechanical properties can critically affect device performance. The mechanical properties of elastomers are known to vary with both curing and operational temperatures. However, even for the elastomer most commonly employed in microfluidic applications, Sylgard 184, only a very limited range of data exists regarding the variation in mechanical properties of bulk PDMS with curing temperature. We report an investigation of the variation in the mechanical properties of bulk Sylgard 184 with curing temperature, over the range 25 °C to 200 °C. PDMS samples for tensile and compressive testing were fabricated according to ASTM standards. Data obtained indicates variation in mechanical properties due to curing temperature for Young's modulus of 1.32–2.97 MPa, ultimate tensile strength of 3.51–7.65 MPa, compressive modulus of 117.8–186.9 MPa and ultimate compressive strength of 28.4–51.7 GPa in a range up to 40% strain and hardness of 44–54 ShA.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/efdbee710fc09788058041da25bb5b2469cb7523

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Citations in the corpus

Extended PDMS stiffness range for flexible systems (2015, neutral): “Much work has been done into the investigation of the mechanical properties of PDMS and their potential tunability [24, 26, 21, 27, 28, 16, 29, 30, 17, 31, 4, 32, 33, 34, 35].”
Properties and Applications of PDMS for Biomedical Engineering: A Review (2021, background): “PDMS is also chemically inert, thermally stable, permeable to gases, simple to handle and manipulate, exhibits isotropic and homogeneous properties and can replicate submicron features to develop microstructures [19,21,48].”
A survey of icephobic coatings and their potential use in a hybrid coating/active ice protection system for aerospace applications (2019, neutral): “Polydimethylsiloxane based viscoelastic elastomer coatings 1–3MPa [133,134] - Young's modulus too low to be used in a hybrid system”