Regulation of Micropillar Height via Replica Molding Using Photocurable Resins

초록

Replica molding is a facile technique to construct microstructures for various applications including dry adhesives, tissue engineering, and optics. However, the replicated structures from the same batch only have a uniform height and new master molds are required through the other expensive lithographic techniques in order to construct microstructures with different heights. Herein, we report a new strategy toward the height-tunable replica molding of micropillar by varying the cavity size of the mold and/or the viscosity of photocurable polymeric resin. The height of the cured micropillar reduced as the size of cavities becomes smaller or viscosity of resin increases using a higher molecular weight resin. In addition, the heights of micropillar are arbitrarily patterned in a single microarray by applying a masking technique for sequential construction of the micropillar array with two photocurable resins with different viscosities.