Emulsification in a microfluidic flow-focusing device: effect of the viscosities of the liquids |
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| Authors: | Zhihong Nie MinsSeok Seo Shengqing Xu Patrick C Lewis Michelle Mok Eugenia Kumacheva George M Whitesides Piotr Garstecki Howard A Stone |
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| Affiliation: | (1) Department of Chemistry, University of Toronto, 80 St. George Street, Toronto, ON, Canada, M5S 3H6;(2) Department of Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry, University of Toronto, 200 College street, Toronto, ON, Canada, M5S 3E5;(3) Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering, University of Toronto, 4 Taddle Creek Road, Toronto, ON, Canada;(4) Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Harvard University, 12 Oxford St., Cambridge, MA 02138-4307, USA;(5) Institute of Physical Chemistry, Polish Academy of Sciences, Kasprzaka 44/52, 01-224 Warsaw, Poland;(6) School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138-4307, USA; |
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| Abstract: | We report the results of a comparative study of microfluidic emulsification of liquids with different viscosities. Depending
on the properties of the fluids and their rates of flow, emulsification occurred in the dripping and jetting regimes. We studied
the characteristic features and typical dependence of the size and of the size distribution of droplets in each regime. For
each liquid, we identified a range of hydrodynamic conditions promoting generation of highly monodisperse droplets. Viscosity
played an important role in emulsification: highly viscous liquids were emulsified into larger droplets with lower polydispersity.
Although it was not possible to provide a unified scaling for the volumes of the droplets, our results suggest that the break-up
dynamics of the lower viscosity fluids resembles the rate-of-flow-controlled break-up, as reported earlier for the formation
of bubbles in flow-focusing geometries Garstecki P, Stone HA, Whitesides GM (2005) Phys Rev Lett 94:164501]. The results
of this study can be helpful for a rationalized selection of liquids for the controlled formation of droplets with a predetermined
size and with a narrow distribution of sizes. |
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| Keywords: | Microfluidic Hydrodynamic Droplets Flow-focusing Emulsification |
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