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Emulsification in a microfluidic flow-focusing device: effect of the viscosities of the liquids

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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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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the US Department of Energy under award DE-FG02-00ER45852 and Canada Research Chair Grant. P.G. acknowledges financial support from the Foundation for Polish Science and the support from the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of Poland for the years 2006–2009. We thank for Prof. David James and Ryan Grau (University of Toronto) for helping us in rheology experiments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Chemistry, University of Toronto, 80 St. George Street, Toronto, ON, Canada, M5S 3H6

    Zhihong Nie, MinsSeok Seo, Shengqing Xu, Patrick C. Lewis & Eugenia Kumacheva

  2. Department of Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry, University of Toronto, 200 College street, Toronto, ON, Canada, M5S 3E5

    Michelle Mok & Eugenia Kumacheva

  3. Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering, University of Toronto, 4 Taddle Creek Road, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Eugenia Kumacheva

  4. Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Harvard University, 12 Oxford St., Cambridge, MA, 02138-4307, USA

    George M. Whitesides

  5. Institute of Physical Chemistry, Polish Academy of Sciences, Kasprzaka 44/52, 01-224, Warsaw, Poland

    Piotr Garstecki

  6. School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 02138-4307, USA

    Howard A. Stone

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  1. Zhihong Nie
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  2. MinsSeok Seo
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  4. Patrick C. Lewis
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  5. Michelle Mok
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  6. Eugenia Kumacheva
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  8. Piotr Garstecki
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  9. Howard A. Stone
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Eugenia Kumacheva.

Appendix

Appendix

The volume of an undeformed spherical droplet is given by V = 4/3 πR 3 where R is the radius of the droplet. The volume of the droplet segment is given by Vs = 1/3 πh′2 (3R-h′) where h is the height of the segment. The volume of the disk with height h (h = 2R − h′) is thus equal to (π/12)[2D 3 − (D − h)2 (2D + h)] where D is the diameter of the disk.

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Nie, Z., Seo, M., Xu, S. et al. Emulsification in a microfluidic flow-focusing device: effect of the viscosities of the liquids. Microfluid Nanofluid 5, 585–594 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10404-008-0271-y

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