Analysis of droplet displacement during transport of polydisperse emulsion as drug carriers in microchannels

Abstract

Drug transport in human body is often intensified by various carriers. The simplest and highly effective are emulsions. In these liquids, one phase is dispersed in other in the form of droplets, in which active substance is often dissolved. In existing application of such liquids as carriers, monodispersity of such systems has been a very important parameter, because when all droplets have same size, it is relatively easy to predict drug release time. However, monodisperse emulsion production on an industrial scale is expensive and technologically quite difficult. Therefore, it would be more reasonable to use polydisperse emulsions. However, mechanism of drug release from such carriers is more complicated and difficult to conduct. When emulsion droplets of different sizes pass through microchannels, i.e., blood vessels, individual droplets’ transport velocity is different and interdependent. The ability to predict rate at which individual droplets travel through microchannels will enable control of drug release depending on emulsion parameters. This work presents a detailed analysis of polydisperse emulsion transport through a single microchannel. Dependence of individual droplets velocity on their diameter and position relative to flow axis and influence of these parameters on droplet transport trajectories were studied. These studies were conducted for five liquid flow rates and three emulsion concentrations. As a result of this work, some generalization approach was proposed to estimate droplet transport velocity depending on their position in channel based on reference to single-phase flow. This work may find application in pharmaceutical industry for design of cheaper drug manufacturing technologies. Graphical abstract

A Review on Microchannel Fabrication Methods and Applications in Large-Scale and Prospective Industries

“…There was a flow of 0.01 to 1 µL/s 74) . There are numerous more processes that utilise microchannels to produce droplets and generate bubbles [337][338][339][340][341][342][343][344][345][346][347][348][349][350][351] . Chu and colleagues (2010) created bent rectangular tubes.…”

Liquid-on-solid heterogeneous nucleation for a general synthesis of yolk–shell nanostructures

“…To date, HEN has only been utilized on solid materials, 6 and it would be meaningful to extend it to nanoscale liquid droplets, which have long been serving as reliable carriers and templates at the micron-scale. 7–9…”

“…To date, HEN has only been utilized on solid materials, 6 and it would be meaningful to extend it to nanoscale liquid droplets, which have long been serving as reliable carriers and templates at the micron-scale. [7][8][9] Recently, our group reported the bottom-up fabrication of liquid NPs through the HON via a solute-induced phase separation (SIPS). 10 More specifically, an aqueous solution of kosmotrope 11,12 would be excluded (nucleate) from a water-ethanol mixture, into uniform droplets of 10 À21 to 10 À18 L, which are then preserved by silica shells.…”