THERMOPLASTIC ARTICLES HAVING PRECISE MICRO-SCALE FEATURES AND LONG-RANGE MACRO-SCALE REPRODUCIBILITY

A variety of thermoplastic parts are provided with precise micro-scale features and long-range macro-scale reproducibility. By combining the advantages of rigid tool molding and soft tooling into a hybrid tooling, complex and challenging microfeatures can be created in thermoplastic parts with remarkable positional accuracy and reproducibility. The parts described herein can demonstrate orders of magnitude smaller inter-part variations and order of magnitude smaller variations with respect to a master part as compared to conventional hard and soft tooling methods. In some aspects, a plurality of thermoplastic parts having precision micro-scale features and reproducible macro-scale dimensions are provided wherein the precision micro-scale features on each part comprise at least one challenging microfeature; and wherein a mean normalized displacement of the micro-scale features is about or less when measured between the parts in the plurality of thermoplastic parts.