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Parallelised production of fine and calibrated emulsions by coupling flow-focusing technique and partial wetting phenomenon

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Abstract

The capacity of microfluidic technology to fabricate monodisperse emulsion droplets is well established. Parallelisation of droplet production is a prerequisite for using such an approach for making high-quality materials for either fundamental or industrial applications where product quantity matters. Here, we investigate the emulsification efficiency of parallelised drop generators based on a flow-focusing geometry when incorporating the role of partial wetting in order to make emulsion droplets with a diameter below 10 μm. Confinement intrinsically encountered in microsystems intensifies the role played by interfaces between liquids and solids. We thus take advantage of partial wetting to enhance the maximum confinement accessible due to liquid flow focusing. We compare the performances brought by partial wetting to more established routes such as step emulsification. We show that the step configuration and the partial wetting regime are both well suited for being parallelised and thus open the way to the production of fine and calibrated emulsions for further applications. Finally, this new route of emulsification that exploits partial wetting between the fluids and the channel walls opens possibilities to the formation of substantially smaller droplets, as required in many fields of application.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Mathilde Reyssat, Florent Malloggi and Rémi Dreyfus for fruitful discussions as well as Fabrice Monti for technical help. This work was supported by the EC-Marie Curie actions and BioMaX (Project Number 264637), and Investissement d’Avenir Program DigiDiag.

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  1. Céline Cohen

    Present address: CNRS UMR 7336, UNSA Univ, Parc Valrose, 06100, Nice, France

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratoire Colloïdes et Matériaux Divisés, CNRS UMR 8231, ESPCI ParisTech, 10 rue Vauquelin, 75231, Paris, France

    Céline Cohen, Rory Giles, Victoria Sergeyeva, Nitesh Mittal, Jean Baudry, Jérôme Bibette & Nicolas Bremond

  2. Ecole Polytechnique (Member of ParisTech), Palaiseau Cedex, 91128, France

    Nitesh Mittal

  3. Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Ouargla, 30000, Ouargla, Algeria

    Djamal Zerrouki

  4. CNRS UMR 7083, ESPCI ParisTech, 10 rue Vauquelin, 75231, Paris, France

    Patrick Tabeling

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  1. Céline Cohen
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Correspondence to Nicolas Bremond.

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Cohen, C., Giles, R., Sergeyeva, V. et al. Parallelised production of fine and calibrated emulsions by coupling flow-focusing technique and partial wetting phenomenon. Microfluid Nanofluid 17, 959–966 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10404-014-1363-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10404-014-1363-5

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