Robust scalable high throughput production of monodisperse drops

Amstad, Esther; Chemama, Michael; Eggersdorfer, Maximilian L.; Arriaga, Laura R.; Brenner, Michael P.; Weitz, David A.

doi:10.1039/c6lc01075j

Cited by 187 publications

(216 citation statements)

References 46 publications

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“…However, chips have been recently developed to parallelize the production of droplets with good monodispersity by minimizing the flow rate variation 182 or by using emulsification processes that do not depend on the flow rate. [183][184][185] With this technology, relatively large quantities of catalysts could be synthesized with optimal control of the reaction conditions, which could be used to synthesise NPs or catalyse reactions in microfluidic reactors.…”

Section: Future Perspectives On Particle Synthesismentioning

confidence: 99%

Microfluidics and catalyst particles

et al. 2019

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In this review article, we discuss the latest advances and future perspectives of microfluidics for micro/ nanoscale catalyst particle synthesis and analysis. In the first section, we present an overview of the different methods to synthesize catalysts making use of microfluidics and in the second section, we critically review catalyst particle characterization using microfluidics. The strengths and challenges of these approaches are highlighted with various showcases selected from the recent literature. In the third section, we give our opinion on the future perspectives of the combination of catalytic nanostructures and microfluidics. We anticipate that in the synthesis and analysis of individual catalyst particles, generation of higher throughput and better understanding of transport inside individual porous catalyst particles are some of the most important benefits of microfluidics for catalyst research. SynthesisThis section focuses on the most recent approaches within the last 8 years. For a more extensive overview of the synthesis of nanostructures focused on the processes taking place inside the microfluidic systems, 5 the final application 4 or the microfluidic technology used 6,7 we refer the reader to other review articles. Metal nanoparticlesMetal nanoparticles exhibit very interesting catalytic, optical, chemical, electromagnetic and magnetic properties, all of them depending to a large degree on their size and composition. Regarding catalysis, a decrease of the NP size leads to a surface-area increase per mass, providing more active sites. Also, the surface structure is of vital importance for the NP selectivity: the presence of steps, edges or terraces in the atomic surface can influence the reaction pathways to Lab Chip, 2019, 19, 3575-3601 | 3575 This journal is

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Section: Future Perspectives On Particle Synthesismentioning

confidence: 99%

Microfluidics and catalyst particles

et al. 2019

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“…[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16] Parallelization has been used with particular success to increase the production rate of microfluidic generated materials to the scale required for economic commercial use, including nanomaterials, microparticles, and a variety of single and multiple emulsions. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12] In particular, microfluidic generated micro and nanoparticles have shown excellent pharmacokinetic properties, superior control over drug release rates, long term stable formulations and higher drug encapsulation efficiencies compared to conventional approaches, such as ball milling. 13 This approach has also been applied successfully to increase the throughput of micro-sensors to detect cells and molecular markers [14][15][16][17] and to perform digital droplet based assays.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…1b). 1,2,[4][5][6]9,20 Using these generators that are connected in a ladder geometry with only one set of inlets and outlets, we generated 1 trillion monodispersed droplets / hour with a CV < 5% for diameters ranging from 21-28 µm. We have also generated monodispersed polycaprolactone (PCL) solid microparticles (dp = 5.3 -9.0 µm) with a coefficient of variation CV <5% at a production rate as high as 60 grams/hr.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Robust Microfabrication of Highly Parallelized Three-Dimensional Microfluidics on Silicon

Yadavali

Lee

Issadore

2019

Preprint

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We present a new, robust three dimensional microfabrication method for highly parallel microfluidics, to improve the throughput of on-chip material synthesis by allowing parallel and simultaneous operation of many replicate devices on a single chip. Recently, parallelized microfluidic chips fabricated in Silicon and glass have been developed to increase the throughput of microfluidic materials synthesis to an industrially relevant scale. These parallelized microfluidic chips require large arrays (> 10,000) of Through Silicon Vias (TSVs) to deliver fluid from delivery channels to the parallelized devices. Ideally, these TSVs should have a small footprint to allow a high density of features to be packed into a single chip, have channels on both sides of the wafer, and at the same time minimize debris generation and wafer warping to enable permanent bonding of the device to glass. Because of these requirements and challenges, previous approaches cannot be easily applied to produce three dimensional microfluidic chips with a large array of TSVs. To address these issues, in this paper we report a fabrication strategy for the robust fabrication of three-dimensional Silicon microfluidic chips consisting of a dense array of TSVs, designed specifically for highly parallelized microfluidics. In particular, we have developed a two-layer TSV design that allows small diameter vias (d < 20 µm) without sacrificing the mechanical stability of the chip and a patterned SiO2 etch-stop layer to replace the use of carrier wafers in Deep Reactive Ion Etching (DRIE). Our microfabrication strategy allows >50,000 (d = 15 µm) TSVs to be fabricated on a single 4" wafer, using only conventional semiconductor fabrication equipment, with 100% yield (M = 16 chips) compared to 30% using previous approaches. We demonstrated the utility of these fabrication strategies by developing a chip that incorporates 20,160 flow focusing droplet generators onto a single 4" Silicon wafer, representing a 100% increase in the total number of droplet generators than previously reported. To demonstrate the utility of this chip for generating pharmaceutical microparticle formulations, we generated 5-9 µm polycaprolactone particles with a CV <5% at a rate as high as 60 g/hr (> 1 trillion particles / hour).

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“…18–25 To integrate a large number of parallelized droplet generators and to have each of them produce identical droplets, architectures have been developed that use a three-dimensional network of microchannels to uniformly distribute fluids to each droplet generator from a single set of injection ports. In particular, the ladder geometry, which takes advantage of distribution channels with large cross-sections and low hydrodynamic resistances, has enabled the parallelization of a large number of droplet generators in compact devices.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Liter-scale production of uniform gas bubbles via parallelization of flow-focusing generators

et al. 2017

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Microscale gas bubbles have demonstrated enormous utility as versatile templates for the synthesis of functional materials in medicine, ultra-lightweight materials and acoustic metamaterials. In many of these applications, high uniformity of the size of the gas bubbles is critical to achieve the desired properties and functionality. While microfluidics have been used with success to create gas bubbles that have a uniformity not achievable using conventional methods, the inherently low volumetric flow rate of microfluidics has limited its use in most applications. Parallelization of liquid droplet generators, in which many droplet generators are incorporated onto a single chip, has shown great promise for the large scale production of monodisperse liquid emulsion droplets. However, the scale-up of monodisperse gas bubbles using such an approach has remained a challenge because of possible coupling between parallel bubbles generators and feedback effects from the downstream channels. In this report, we systematically investigate the effect of factors such as viscosity of the continuous phase, Capillary number, and gas pressure as well as the channel uniformity on the size distribution of gas bubbles in a parallelized microfluidic device. We show that, by optimizing the flow conditions, a device with 400 parallel flow focusing generators on a footprint of 5 × 5 cm2 can be used to generate gas bubbles with a coefficient of variation of less than 5% at a production rate of approximately 1 L/hr. Our results suggest that the optimization of flow conditions using a device with a small number (e.g., 8) of parallel FFGs can facilitate large-scale bubble production.

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Robust scalable high throughput production of monodisperse drops

Cited by 187 publications

References 46 publications

Microfluidics and catalyst particles

Microfluidics and catalyst particles

Robust Microfabrication of Highly Parallelized Three-Dimensional Microfluidics on Silicon

Liter-scale production of uniform gas bubbles via parallelization of flow-focusing generators

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