Monodispersed microbubble formation using microchannel technique

Formation of monodisperse microbubbles in a microfluidic device

“…Deionized water was used as the continuous phase. Different concentrations of sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS) or polyoxyethylene (20) sorbitan monolaurate (Tween 20) used as the surfactants were added to the aqueous phase. SDS concentrations ranged from 0.01 to 0.5 wt % to control the interfacial tension between the aqueous phase and the air phase.…”

“…In their work, the bubbles were highly uniform and was Ͻ2%. Yasuno et al 20 reported monodisperse microbubble formation using the method of geometrydominated breakup in a microchannels (MCs) plate. From their work, the microbubble formation appears to be based on the spontaneous transformation caused by surface tension; moreover, the bubble size was affected by viscosity and the dispersing agents, but independent of the interfacial tension.…”

Production of uniform droplets using membrane, microchannel and microfluidic emulsification devices

“…The examples of such microparticles produced using MCE are polymer microspheres (Sugiura et al, 2001;Sugiura et al, 2002d), gel microbeads (Iwamoto et al, 2002;Sugiura et al, 2005;Ikkai et al, 2005;Chuah et al, 2009), solid lipid microparticles (Sugiura et al, 2000;Kobayashi et al, 2003b), complex coacervate microcapsules (Nakagawa et al, 2004), and giant lipid vesicles (Kuroiwa et al, 2009). MC array devices have also been used for production of monodispersed microbubbles (Yasuno et al, 2004), discoid droplets (Kobayashi et al, 2006), surfactant-free droplets stabilized by silica nanoparticles (Xu et al, 2005c) and oil droplets stabilised by lecithin-chitosan interfacial bilayers (Chuah et al, 2009b). Because of its ability to generate monodisperse droplets of tunable size on a larger scale than planar microfluidic devices, MCE is a usuful technique for fundamental studies on emulsions, for example studies of emulsion stability (Liu et al, 2001), crystallisation of emulsion droplets (Hamada et al, 2002), in vitro digestability of emulsified lipids, etc.…”

Droplet formation in microfluidic cross-junctions

“…Many microfluidic devices have been designed to generate uniform droplets, including geometry-dominated devices, 13,14 flow-focusing devices, [15][16][17][18][19] T-junctions, [20][21][22][23][24][25][26] and co-flowing devices. 27,28 However, the underlying mechanisms of droplet formation in microchannels have not been well understood, which hinders device optimization and operation.…”