Three-dimensional printing of transparent fused silica glass.

Glass is one of the most important high-performance materials used for scientific research, in industry and in society, mainly owing to its unmatched optical transparency, outstanding mechanical, chemical and thermal resistance as well as its thermal and electrical insulating properties. However, glasses and especially high-purity glasses such as fused silica glass are notoriously difficult to shape, requiring high-temperature melting and casting processes for macroscopic objects or hazardous chemicals for microscopic features. These drawbacks have made glasses inaccessible to modern manufacturing technologies such as three-dimensional printing (3D printing). Using a casting nanocomposite, here we create transparent fused silica glass components using stereolithography 3D printers at resolutions of a few tens of micrometres. The process uses a photocurable silica nanocomposite that is 3D printed and converted to high-quality fused silica glass via heat treatment. The printed fused silica glass is non-porous, with the optical transparency of commercial fused silica glass, and has a smooth surface with a roughness of a few nanometres. By doping with metal salts, coloured glasses can be created. This work widens the choice of materials for 3D printing, enabling the creation of arbitrary macro- and microstructures in fused silica glass for many applications in both industry and academia.

Correction: Rational design of a peptide capture agent for CXCL8 based on a model of the CXCL8:CXCR1 complex.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1039/C4RA13749C.].

Transparent, abrasion-insensitive superhydrophobic coatings for real-world applications.

Superhydrophobic surfaces and surface coatings are of high interest for many applications in everyday life including non-wetting and low-friction coatings as well as functional clothing. Manufacturing of these surfaces is intricate since superhydrophobicity requires structuring of surfaces on a nano- to microscale. This delicate surface structuring makes most superhydrophobic surfaces very sensitive to abrasion and renders them impractical for real-life applications. In this paper we present a transparent fluorinated polymer foam that is synthesized by a simple one-step photoinitiated radical polymerization. We term this material "Fluoropor". It possesses an inherent nano-/microstructure throughout the whole bulk material and is thus insensitive to abrasion as its superhydrophobic properties are not merely due to a thin-layer surface-effect. Due to its foam-like structure with pore sizes below the wavelength of visible light Fluoropor appears optically transparent. We determined contact angles, surface energy, wear resistance and Vickers hardness to highlight Fluoropor's applicability for real-word applications.

Liquid Glass: A Facile Soft Replication Method for Structuring Glass.

Liquid glass is a photocurable amorphous silica nanocomposite that can be structured using soft replication molds and turned into glass via thermal debinding and sintering. Simple polymer bonding techniques allow the fabrication of complex microsystems in glass like microfluidic chips. Liquid glass is a step toward prototyping of glass microstructures at low cost without requiring cleanroom facilities or hazardous chemicals.

Tacky cyclic olefin copolymer: a biocompatible bonding technique for the fabrication of microfluidic channels in COC.

Cyclic olefin copolymer (COC) is widely used in microfluidics due to its UV-transparency, its biocompatibility and high chemical resistance. Here we present a fast and cost-effective solvent bonding technique, which allows for the efficient bonding of protein-patterned COC structures. The bonding process is carried out at room temperature and takes less than three minutes. Enzyme activity is retained upon bonding and microstructure deformation does not occur.

Liquid polystyrene: a room-temperature photocurable soft lithography compatible pour-and-cure-type polystyrene.

Materials matter in microfluidics. Since the introduction of soft lithography as a prototyping technique and polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) as material of choice the microfluidics community has settled with using this material almost exclusively. However, for many applications PDMS is not an ideal material given its limited solvent resistance and hydrophobicity which makes it especially disadvantageous for certain cell-based assays. For these applications polystyrene (PS) would be a better choice. PS has been used in biology research and analytics for decades and numerous protocols have been developed and optimized for it. However, PS has not found widespread use in microfluidics mainly because, being a thermoplastic material, it is typically structured using industrial polymer replication techniques. This makes PS unsuitable for prototyping. In this paper, we introduce a new structuring method for PS which is compatible with soft lithography prototyping. We develop a liquid PS prepolymer which we term as "Liquid Polystyrene" (liqPS). liqPS is a viscous free-flowing liquid which can be cured by visible light exposure using soft replication templates, e.g., made from PDMS. Using liqPS prototyping microfluidic systems in PS is as easy as prototyping microfluidic systems in PDMS. We demonstrate that cured liqPS is (chemically and physically) identical to commercial PS. Comparative studies on mouse fibroblasts L929 showed that liqPS cannot be distinguished from commercial PS in such experiments. Researchers can develop and optimize microfluidic structures using liqPS and soft lithography. Once the device is to be commercialized it can be manufactured using scalable industrial polymer replication techniques in PS--the material is the same in both cases. Therefore, liqPS effectively closes the gap between "microfluidic prototyping" and "industrial microfluidics" by providing a common material.