Optical Microfabrication of Porous Films

Abstract

In the last years, efforts have been directed towards developing and fabricating porous materials with a wide range of applications, from pharmaceutical research to drug delivery matrices. In this work, porous films and 3D structures were fabricated by exposinga commercial UV optical adhesive as a photoresist to the irradiation of a UV lamp or, for 3D microfabrication, the irradiation with an IR femtosecond laser from a two-photon microscope (2PM). Using the software-controlled scanning mirrors available in any 2PM, arbitrary structures both 2D and 3D can be prepared in a few minutes for a fraction of the cost of a traditional lithography technique. The reproducibility and quality of the obtained patterns, provide an enormous advantage for cheap and straightforward design of porous materials allowing to scale up the manufacturing processes. The possibility of incorporating into uncured photoresist materials such as drugs, metallic or magnetic nanoparticles, and fluorescent agents, have been demonstrated and opened new opportunities for the fabrication of low-cost porous active devices.