Investigation of droplet break-up and flow in a concentrated emulsion
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Droplet microfluidics, which uses microdroplets suspended in a carrier oil as individual biochemical reactors, has enabled massive parallelization of reactions with sub-nanoliter reagent consumption per reaction. It has found a wide range of applications, including digital polymerase chain reaction, antibiotic screening, and directed evolution of enzymes. However, unlike solid microwells, droplet-based microreactors are metastable and can undergo break-up into small daughter drops, thereby compromising the accuracy of the assay. Droplets are prone to break-up during the serial interrogation process, in which drops are injected as a monolayer into a taper-shaped channel leading to a constriction for the optical or electronic interrogation of the droplet content one at a time. The onset of droplet breakup sets the upper limit in the throughput of the interrogation process. Few studies have attempted to increase the throughput of the drop interrogation process. Motivated by this gap in knowledge, the work presented in this dissertation had two broad aims: 1) Describe concentrated emulsion flow to gain a fundamental understanding of break-up; 2) Increase drop throughput by reducing drop break-up. To address the first aim, we studied the timescale and special distribution of drop rearrangement events in a low strain-rate regime (Chapter 2, capillary number Ca~10^(-7) to 10^(-2)). In this regime, the interfacial effects dominate the viscous effects. To address the second aim, we developed two strategies to reduce drop break-up and increase drop throughput. Experiments were conducted in high strain-rate regime (Chapter 3-4, Ca> 10^(-2)). In this regime, the viscous effects become important, and emulsions begin to exhibit droplet break-ups. The results presented in this dissertation provide significant guidance to the design of flow control elements in droplet microfluidic devices, improving drop throughput applications, and understanding the effect of microscopic drop behavior on macroscopic emulsion flow behaviors
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2020; ©2020 |
| Publication date | 2020; 2020 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Bick, Alison Dana |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Tang, Sindy (Sindy K.Y.) |
| Thesis advisor | Tang, Sindy (Sindy K.Y.) |
| Thesis advisor | Cai, Wei, 1977- |
| Thesis advisor | Fuller, Gerald G |
| Degree committee member | Cai, Wei, 1977- |
| Degree committee member | Fuller, Gerald G |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Mechanical Engineering |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Alison Bick |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Mechanical Engineering |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2020 |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2020 by Alison Dana Bick
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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