Dynamic behavior of droplet formation in dripping mode of capillary flow focusing

Abstract

Experimental study on the liquid dripping in a capillary flow focusing process is performed. Due to the high-speed gas stream that drives the inner liquid co-flowing through an orifice, complex phenomena for the droplet formation in dripping regime can be found as the gas pressure drop and the liquid flow rate change. Periodic dripping mode can produce uniform droplets, and non-periodic ones can result in satellites and droplets of different diameters. The droplet-droplet coalescence in the core of co-flowing gas stream is also obtained. The size of resultant droplets is measured under different values of gas pressure drop and liquid flow rate. It can be seen that the droplet size tends to decrease as the gas pressure drop increases and keeps nearly the same as the liquid flow rate increases. The results also indicate that the dynamic behavior of droplet formation in dripping mode of capillary flow focusing is mainly dominated by the gas pressure drop, and the capillary flow focusing technique can produce droplets with high throughput even in the dripping regime. Cited as: Si, T. Dynamic behavior of droplet formation in dripping mode of capillary flow focusing. Capillarity, 2021, 4(3): 45-49, doi: 10.46690/capi.2021.03.01