2 Photon Lithography Printing
I’m currently UROPing in the Raman Lab at MIT. I’m working on a project that is testing the force a cultured skeletal muscle ring can produce when electrically stimulated. The testing assembly attaches two skeletal rings to a bistable mechanism that can pull the structure to change equilibrium positions. However, the muscle imparts force on the scale of micronewtons, and as a result, every part of this testing rig is manufactured on a very small scale. Our strategy for manufacturing the bistable mechanism is to print it out of resin and then create a silicone mold using the print. Then we silanize the mold, and cast a mechanism out of PDMS.
I got to go to MIT.nano’s rapid prototyping facilities and use the 2 Photon Lithography Printer to print the mold positive. This type of printer still uses a liquid resin, but cures it via a laser passing through a microscope objective, allowing a very high-resolution print. For an idea of scale, the photo on the left shows the glass substrate we print on, which has an area of 1 square cm. However, the prints are not perfect, and the images I took below show some fabrication faults I discovered.
