Sealing of polymer micro-structures by over-moulding

A concept for sealing of polymer micro-structures by over-moulding with polystyrene was devised and investigated by both experiments and simulations. The depth to which the melt filled the structure, i.e. a groove in the surface of the insert, before solidification was compared with results from simulations by computational fluid dynamics software. In both experiments and simulations, there was clearly an increase of filling depth with groove width and, especially for wide grooves, with injection temperature. In the simulations, changes in prescribed heat transfer coefficient had the largest effect on filling depth in the narrowest grooves. Around the experimental groove widths, there was good agreement between experiments and simulations. It was concluded that sealing by over-moulding is feasible if the depth/width ratio of the structure is large enough which in this paper is larger than six, i.e. up to several times the filling depth in a corresponding metal or silicon structure.