Size analysis of the liquid thread in a gas-liquid droplet microfluidic device operating in the jetting regime

• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20409207

High inertial gas-liquid droplet microfluidics technology has become a potential tool to generate μm sized liquid droplets with its advantages of high throughput and the absence of an oil phase. Among all the flow regimes in gas-liquid microfluidic flow, the Jetting regime produces less uniform yet smaller droplets as opposed to the Dripping regime that has high droplet uniformity but with a larger size. Presented herein is a characterization of the Jetting regime for different gas-liquid flow-focusing configurations. In the experiments, a high-speed camera recorded the microjets obtained through the experiments to extract their size features with an image processing tool in MATLAB. A scaling analysis model on jet diameter is proposed after analyzing the effect of liquid/gas flow rate and channel geometries on jet size. Other relevant hypotheses used to predict jet diameter and length are also discussed in this thesis.--Author's abstract