Generation of Uniform Liquid Droplets in a Microfluidic Chip Using a High-Speed Gaseous Microflow

Abstract

Miniaturized laboratory-on-a-chip systems have been extensively developed over the past decade as promising tools for a wide range of applications, specifically in chemical synthesis and biomedical diagnostics. Droplet-based microfluidic systems have become ubiquitous in such applications by providing essential tools to perform rapid as well as high throughput measurements on small volumes of fluids. Thus far, the majority of the research endeavors have been focused on liquid-liquid systems for generating microscale drops (typically water in oil). Droplets generated in liquid-liquid microfluidic systems tend to be very uniform in size, and due to high surface area to volume ratio of micro-droplets, heat and mass transfer occurs at higher rates as compared to continuous-flow microfluidics. Generation of droplets in a gaseous medium, on the other hand, have been widely used in applications that involve open environment liquid spraying, such as ink-jet printers. However, usually in such applications there is no control over either the size or frequency of the generated droplets, and as a result droplets formed in these systems are widely distributed in size. Here we demonstrate an alternative scheme for controlled generation of liquid droplets in a microfluidic chip using a high speed gas stream. We have incorporated the inertial effect of a high-speed gaseous medium with the flow-focusing geometry, fabricated in a PDMS chip, in order to generate droplets with controlled size. Flow regimes involved in this scheme may be divided in three main regions i.e. co-flow, jetting, and dripping among which only dripping regime is capable of producing distinct aqueous droplets in the channel. It should be noted that poor surface conditions and high gas flow rates may result in generation of satellite droplets together with the main droplet in the dripping region, which substantially affects the monodispersity of the droplets. The generated drops were collected thereafter and it is shown that monodisperse droplets with known size ranging from 50 μm to 100 μm in diameter can be achieved within the dripping flow regime. We believe this method offers beneficial opportunities for the next generation of Lab-on-a-chip devices in which the introduction of a gaseous medium is required, namely oxidation, detection of airborne particles, and formation of micro-particles and micro-gels. Furthermore, the high speed droplets generated in this method represent the basis for a new approach based on droplet pair collisions for fast efficient micromixing which provides a significant development in modern LOC and mTAS devices.