Iso- and variothermal injection compression moulding of polymer micro- and nanostructures for optical and medical applications

The surfaces of medical and optical polymer products are being increasingly functionalized with micro- and nanostructures using mass replication methods like injection moulding. We compared the filling behaviour and replication quality of such structures using four different moulding processes with two polymers of different viscosity and wetting behaviour. For this purpose, we replicated three representative 2D and 3D micro- and nanostructures into polymethylmethacrylate and amorphous polyamide by isothermal and variothermal injection moulding with and without compression, respectively, using the same mould. The parallel compression phase reduced the internal pressure in the cavity, leading to fewer demoulding issues but without significant influence on the replication fidelity. Variothermal heating of the mould in combination with a polymer of low viscosity and good wetting behaviour was favourable especially for filling of high aspect-ratio structures. For microstructure replication, melt viscosity and no-flow temperature were clearly more relevant than wetting as flow resistance and frozen layer formation are the main reasons for incomplete filling at this length scale. In nanostructures, the capillary effect becomes increasingly dominant depending on the surface energy of the polymer.