Hello,

I was wondering if anyone has noticed something curious about bonding PDMS to
glass. Typically, before bonding my PDMS structure to a glass slide, I clean
the slide with acetone, IPA, DI water and then bake dry. Then I put my slide
and PDMS in O2 plasma for 10 sec at 30 W and I get rock solid bonds. But, there
were a couple instances where the slide was especially dirty, so I tried
cleaning it by itself in 02 plasma for 2-3min at 300W. When that was done, I
went through the standard bonding procedure with PDMS and found there to be no
bonding whatsoever (it was worse than before the cleaning). Apparently, the
strong plasma makes the glass "too clean" and inert to PDMS bonding.

This turned out to be a major source of trouble for me when I first tried
bonding PDMS because I was over cleaning the slides. I was wondering if anyone
else has noticed this sensitivity with glass cleaning and if there's any way
to "roughen up" the glass surface again after a slide has been cleaned.

thanks in advance,
Joe Grogan