On Modeling the Mechanical Behavior of Amorphous Polymers for the Micro-Hot-Embossing of Microfluidic Devices

In this paper, a brief summary of some of our recent work [1, 2] is presented, with the goal of developing an engineering science-based process-simulation capability for micro-hot-embossing of amorphous polymers. To achieve this goal: (i) a three-dimensional thermo-mechanically-coupled large deformation constitutive theory has been developed to model the temperature and rate-dependent elastic-viscoplastic response of amorphous polymers; (ii) the material parameters in the theory were calibrated by using new experimental data from a suite of simple compression tests on Zeonex-690R (cyclo-olefin polymer), that covers a wide range of temperatures and strain rates; (iii) the constitutive model was implemented in the finite element program ABAQUS/Explicit; and (iv) the predictive capability of the numerical simulation procedures were validated by comparing results from the simulation of a representative micro-hot-embossing process against corresponding results from a physical experiment.