Fig. 3: Mechanisms of soft demoulding and rigid demoulding.
From: Self-shrinking soft demoulding for complex high-aspect-ratio microchannels
a The stress-strain curvatures of a rigid template (copper) and a soft template (thermoplastic resin). b The critical fracture force and shear force of the rigid template (copper wire with 20 mm embedded length) for different filament diameters. The shadow region represents the range of the demoulding failure. c The force/diameter–displacement curve with different embedded lengths (EL) for rigid templates (copper). The diameter of the copper wire is 80 μm. d The critical fracture force and peel force varying with the diameter of soft template (thermoplastic resin). The intersections in the plot indicate the minimum diameter for initiating the peel process with certain peel angles (0, 20, and 30°). The shadow region represents the demoulding failure. e The pull-out force of the soft templates. Peeling of the soft template from the matrix is shown in the inset. Images in the inset are representative of three independent soft demoulding processes (experimental replicates). Scale bar, 100 µm. f Comparison of the pull-out force of the rigid templates and the soft templates. The data are presented as mean values \(\pm\) standard deviation for the number of trials n = 3.
