Laboratory for Manufacturing and Sustainability

This paper discusses a novel method for designing imprint rolls for the fabrication of fluid pathways. Roller imprint processes have applications in diverse areas including fuel cell manufacturing and microfluidic device fabrication. Robust design methods are required for developing imprint rolls with optimal features. In the method discussed in this paper, the rolls are designed procedurally with the fluid pathway design given as input. The pathways are decomposed into repeating features (or tiles), and the rolls are designed by first modeling a small set of unique tiles and then combining them to model the entire roll. The tiling strategy decreases the complexity of the model, and reduces the time taken for designing the rolls. The modular nature of the tiles also improves the efficiency of post-processing operations like feature identification and optimization, and the generation of toolpaths for machining the roll.