Herein we describe a versatile new strategy for producing monodisperse solid particles with sizes from 20 to 1000 mm. The method involves the formation of monodisperse liquid droplets by using a microfluidic device and shaping the droplets in a microchannel and then solidifying these drops in situ either by polymerizing a liquid monomer or by lowering the temperature of a liquid that sets thermally. This method has the following features: 1) It produces particles with an exceptionally narrow range of sizes.[1] 2) A new level of control over the shapes of the particles is offered.3) The mechanism for droplet formation allows the use of a wide variety of materials including gels, metals, polymers, and polymers doped with functional additives. 4) The procedure can be scaled up to produce large numbers of particles.
We report a novel approach to continuous and scalable production of core-shell droplets and polymer capsules in microfluidic devices. The described method is also useful in the synthesis of polymer particles with nonspherical shapes. We used capillary instability-driven break-up of a liquid jet formed by two immiscible fluids. Precise control of emulsification of each liquid allowed for the production of highly monodisperse core-shell droplets with a predetermined diameter of cores and thickness of shells. We also achieved control over the number of cores per droplet and the location of cores in the droplet. We carried out fast throughput photopolymerization of the monomeric shells and obtained polymer particles with various shapes and morphologies, including spheres, truncated spheres and, hemispheres, and single and multicore capsules.
This article provides an overview of our work in the area of the synthesis of polymer particles in continuous microfluidic reactors. The method includes (a) the generation of highly monodisperse monomer droplets in a microfluidic flow-focusing device and (b) in-situ solidification of these droplets by means of photopolymerization. We discuss the effect of monomer properties on the emulsification process, the effect of the polymerization rate on the production of high-quality particles, the role of the material of the microfluidic device in droplet formation, and the synthesis of particles with different shapes and compositions. We also demonstrate the production of highly ordered arrays of polymer particles achieved by photopolymerization of the dynamic lattices of monomer droplets in microfluidic channels. The article is concluded with a summary of future research directions in the production of polymer colloids in microfluidic reactors.
We report the results of a comparative study of microfluidic emulsification of liquids with different viscosities. Depending on the properties of the fluids and their rates of flow, emulsification occurred in the dripping and jetting regimes. We studied the characteristic features and typical dependence of the size and of the size distribution of droplets in each regime. For each liquid, we identified a range of hydrodynamic conditions promoting generation of highly monodisperse droplets. Viscosity played an important role in emulsification: highly viscous liquids were emulsified into larger droplets with lower polydispersity. Although it was not possible to provide a unified scaling for the volumes of the droplets, our results suggest that the break-up dynamics of the lower viscosity fluids resembles the rate-of-flow-controlled break-up, as reported earlier for the formation of bubbles in flow-focusing geometries [Garstecki P, Stone HA, Whitesides GM (2005) Phys Rev Lett 94:164501]. The results of this study can be helpful for a rationalized selection of liquids for the controlled formation of droplets with a predetermined size and with a narrow distribution of sizes.
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