Accounting for corner flow unifies the understanding of droplet formation in microfluidic channels

Clicks: 208
ID: 30822
2019
Article Quality & Performance Metrics
Overall Quality
Not rated
Combines reader engagement with the AI quality analysis. This article has not been analysed, so there is no overall score — reader engagement is measured and shown alongside.
AI Quality Assessment
Not analyzed
Readership in this journal
Steady

Ranked #291 of 485 articles by views in Nature communications

Most read Least read

Bar heights use a square-root scale. Only the 120 most-read articles are drawn; the journal has 485 in total.

Mint this article as an NFT
Not yet minted

Create a permanent, verifiable on-chain record of this article on the Scimatic Network. The NFT is held in your Journament account, and you can withdraw it to your own wallet at any time.

5 SUSD one-off · no wallet required
Sign in to mint
Abstract
While shear emulsification is a well understood industrial process, geometrical confinement in microfluidic systems introduces fascinating complexity, so far prohibiting complete understanding of droplet formation. The size of confined droplets is controlled by the ratio between shear and capillary forces when both are of the same order, in a regime known as jetting, while being surprisingly insensitive to this ratio when shear is orders of magnitude smaller than capillary forces, in a regime known as squeezing. Here, we reveal that further reduction of-already negligibly small-shear unexpectedly re-introduces the dependence of droplet size on shear/capillary-force ratio. For the first time we formally account for the flow around forming droplets, to predict and discover experimentally an additional regime-leaking. Our model predicts droplet size and characterizes the transitions from leaking into squeezing and from squeezing into jetting, unifying the description for confined droplet generation, and offering a practical guide for applications.
Reference Key
korczyk2019accountingnature Use this key to autocite in the manuscript while using SciMatic Manuscript Manager or Thesis Manager
Authors Korczyk, P.
Journal Nature communications
Year 2019
DOI
10.1038/s41467-019-10505-5
URL
Keywords Keywords not found

Citations

No citations found. To add a citation, contact the admin at info@scimatic.org

Comments

No comments yet. Be the first to comment on this article.