Abstract

The merged droplets have great practical application value in protein synthesis and crystallization. In this paper, the effect of geometry configuration on the merged droplet formation in a double T-junction microchannel is studied by three-dimensional numerical simulation using the level-set method. There are three important parameters in the geometry configuration of the microchannel, namely angle between two phases (α), height-to-width ratio (Ʌ = H/wc), and intersection width ratio (Γ = wd/wc). In this study we found that a critical value of the two-phase angle is 60°. When the angle is 60°, the effective diameter of the merged droplet is the smallest and the generation frequency is the fastest under the same physical condition. We found that height-to-width ratio and intersection width ratio have a critical value of 1.0. When height-to-width ratio or intersection width ratio is 1.0, the shearing capacity of the continuous relative dispersed phase reaches a maximum, thus the droplet diameter is minimized and the frequency is the fastest. Therefore, reasonable adjustment of these three factors is an effective method to solve the problem of the high-throughput monodisperse merged droplet formation. This work lays a solid theoretical foundation for the merged droplets in practical applications.

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