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The effect of interfacial tension on droplet formation in flow-focusing microfluidic device

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Abstract

Interfacial tension plays an important role in microfluidic emulsification, which is the process of preparing emulsions. A promising method which controls droplet behavior according to the function of the interfacial tension in the process of microfluidic emulsification is reported. The droplet size and generation frequency changed regularly to obtain appropriate concentrations of surfactant. This method could be of great help for setting up the size-controllable droplet generation systems, and ameliorating the emulsification technology. The interfacial tension effect was first analyzed by computational simulation before the real experiment, which significantly improved the efficiency of the whole research process.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the financial support of National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 10804087.

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Correspondence to Wei Liu or Xing-zhong Zhao.

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Lu Peng and Min Yang contributed equally to this work

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Peng, L., Yang, M., Guo, Ss. et al. The effect of interfacial tension on droplet formation in flow-focusing microfluidic device. Biomed Microdevices 13, 559–564 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10544-011-9526-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10544-011-9526-6

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