Fabrication of Glass Microfluidic Chips for Studying Displacement Processes in Porous Media

Abstract

This paper presents an effective approach to the fabrication of glass microfluidic chips for studying physical and chemical processes on the pore scale during multiphase flows in porous media, including the description of material selection, methods of microchannel formation and substrate bonding, and the fabrication of tooling for chip fixation and connection to fluid sources. The main advantage of the proposed method is related to the availability of the materials used and relative ease of fabrication. At the same time, the chips produced in this way have good mechanical properties, high optical transparency, and chemical inertness. The influence of different material-processing parameters during chip fabrication on their characteristics and properties is studied. The described experience of the authors can be used by a wide range of researchers in developing their own microfluidic platforms based on glass chips not only for studying multiphase filtration in porous media but also for chemical reactions and various studies in the field of biomedicine.