Microfluidic droplet formation in co-flow devices fabricated by micro 3D printing

Abstract

Droplet microfluidics offer many advantages for microscale droplet generation and have great application potential in food emulsion processing. To employ novel technique to develop microfluidic chips, new devices based on a co-flow regime were fabricated by microscale 3D printing via projection microstereoscopic lithography and were applied to produce single emulsion and double emulsion. The results showed that monodisperse water-in-oil (W/O) and oil-in-water (O/W) single emulsion could be produced in the same device with a coefficient of variation (CV) less than 3%. The parallelized microfluidic device has 5 droplet generators and can generate different types of single emulsions with a CV of approximately 3%. Furthermore, double emulsion droplets could be produced without surface treatment. The development of micro 3D printing provides a new way of microfluidics emulsion formation in food, especially for double emulsion formation, which has the great advantage of no surface treatment. These devices provide considerable support for further commercial application of droplet microfluidics. • Using micro 3D printing to develop microfluidic device based on the co-flow regime. • Different types of emulsions can be generated on the same device. • The device can realize the generation of double emulsion without surface treatment.