Sacrificial Powder Pressure Control for Infiltration of Microscale Binder Jet Printed Metal Parts

High-temperature microfluidic devices (such as gas chromatography microcolumns) have traditionally been fabricated using photolithography, etching, and wafer bonding which allow for precise microscale features but lack the ability to form complex 3D designs. Metal additive manufacturing could enable higher complexity microfluidic designs if reliable methods for fabrication are developed, but forming small negative features is challenging—especially in powder-based processes. In this paper, the formation of sealed metal microchannels was demonstrated using stainless-steel binder jetting with bronze infiltration. To create small negative features, bronze infiltrant must fill the porous part produced by binder jetting without filling the negative features. This was achieved through sacrificial powder infiltration (SPI), wherein sacrificial powder reservoirs (pore size ∼60 μm) are used to control infiltrant pressure. With this pressure control, the infiltrant selectively filled the small pores between particles in the printed part (pore size ∼3 μm) while leaving printed microchannels (700 μm, 930 μm) empty. To develop the SPI method, a pore-filling study was performed in this stainless-steel/bronze system with 370 μm, 650 μm, and 930 μm microchannel segments. This study enabled SPI process design on these length scales by determining variations in pore filling across a sample and preferential filling between different-sized pores.