2018/04/04 by Jun Dong, Max Meissner, Dong, Jun +7 · 1 citation
Engineering · #Electrohydrodynamics and Fluid Dynamics #FOS: Physical sciences #Fluid Dynamics and Heat Transfer #Innovative Microfluidic and Catalytic Techniques Innovation #Soft Condensed Matter (cond-mat.soft)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1804.01471
openalex publication_date 2018/04/04 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We propose a novel microfluidic "opposed-flow" geometry in which the continuous fluid phase is fed into a junction in a direction opposite the dispersed phase. This pulls out the dispersed phase into a micron-sized jet, which decays into micron-sized droplets. As the driving pressure is tuned to a critical value, the jet radius vanishes as a power law down to sizes below 1 μm. By contrast, the conventional "coflowing" junction leads to a first order jetting transition, in which the jet disappears at a finite radius of several μm, to give way to a "dripping" state, resulting in much larger droplets. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by producing the first microfluidic silicone oil emulsions with a sub micron particle radius, and utilize these droplets to produce colloidal clusters.