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Metallic glasses: viable tool materials for the production of surface microstructures in amorphous polymers by micro-hot-embossing

David L Henann, Vikas Srivastava, Hayden K Taylor, Melinda R Hale, David E Hardt and Lallit Anand

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Metallic glasses possess unique mechanical properties which make them attractive materials for fabricating components for a variety of applications. For example, the commercial Zr-based metallic glasses possess high tensile strengths (≈2.0 GPa), good fracture toughnesses (≈10–50 MPa\sqrt{\rm {m}}) and good wear and corrosion resistances. A particularly important characteristic of metallic glasses is their intrinsic homogeneity to the nanoscale because of the absence of grain boundaries. This characteristic, coupled with their unique mechanical properties, makes them ideal materials for fabricating micron-scale components, or high-aspect-ratio micro-patterned surfaces, which may in turn be used as dies for the hot-embossing of polymeric microfluidic devices. In this paper we consider a commercially available Zr-based metallic glass which has a glass transition temperature of Tg ≈ 350 °C and describe the thermoplastic forming of a tool made from this material, which has the (negative) microchannel pattern for a simple microfluidic device. This tool was successfully used to produce the microchannel pattern by micro-hot-embossing of the amorphous polymers poly(methyl methacrylate) (Tg ≈ 115 °C) and Zeonex-690R (Tg ≈ 136 °C) above their glass transition temperatures. The metallic glass tool was found to be very robust, and it was used to produce hundreds of high-fidelity micron-scale embossed patterns without degradation or failure.


PACS

81.40.Lm Deformation, plasticity, and creep

64.70.P- Glass transitions of specific systems

47.85.Np Fluidics

85.85.+j Micro- and nano-electromechanical systems (MEMS/NEMS) and devices

81.40.Np Fatigue, corrosion fatigue, embrittlement, cracking, fracture, and failure

81.65.Kn Corrosion protection

Subjects

Fluid dynamics

Electronics and devices

Surfaces, interfaces and thin films

Nanoscale science and low-D systems

Condensed matter: structural, mechanical & thermal

Dates

Issue 11 (November 2009)

Received 21 August 2009, in final form 28 September 2009

Published 19 October 2009



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