Effect of Volume Fraction on Droplet Break-up in an Emulsion Flowing through a Microfluidic Constriction
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This paper reports the effect of droplet volume fraction on the break-up of droplets within an emulsion flowing as a two-dimensional monolayer through a tapered microchannel into a constriction. To obtain emulsions with different volume fractions, a concentrated emulsion with droplet volume fraction φ = 0.85 is injected into the channel and diluted on-chip by introducing an additional continuous phase at different flow rates. At a fixed flow rate, the break-up fraction decreases significantly when the droplet volume fraction φ decreases below ~0.5. This result is consistent with our previous report showing that droplet break-up in the emulsion arises primarily from droplet-droplet interactions. Furthermore, an optimal location for the introduction of the additional continuous phase is identified to be approximately one to two droplet diameters upstream of the constriction. Away from this optimal location, the dilution of the emulsion is ineffective. Assuming a tolerance of a maximum droplet break-up fraction of 0.1, diluting the emulsion 2.1 times from φ = 0.85 to φ = 0.4 increases the droplet throughput by ~1.3 times. As such, while a higher emulsion volume fraction packs more drops per unit volume, the propensity of the drops to undergo break-up limits the throughput if droplet integrity and assay accuracy are to be maintained.
Description
| Type of resource | software, multimedia |
|---|---|
| Date created | 2019 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Bick, Alison |
|---|
Subjects
| Subject | droplet |
|---|---|
| Subject | volume fraction |
| Subject | break-up |
| Subject | emulsion |
| Genre | Dataset |
Bibliographic information
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Collection
Stanford Tang Lab
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- abick@stanford.edu
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