Amphiphilic nanoparticles suppress droplet break-up in a concentrated emulsion flowing through a narrow constriction.

摘要: This paper describes the break-up behavior of a concentrated emulsion comprising drops stabilized by amphiphilic silica nanoparticles flowing in tapered microchannel. Such geometry is often used serial droplet interrogation and sorting processes microfluidics applications. When exposed to high viscous stresses, can undergo compromise their physical integrity. As these are as micro-reactors, such leads loss accuracy droplet-based assays. Here, we show suppressed replacing fluoro-surfactant similar one commonly current applications with stabilizer. We identify parameters that influence demonstrate probability increases increasing capillary number confinement, decreasing nanoparticle size, insensitive viscosity ratio within range tested. Practically, our results reveal two key advantages direct microfluidics. First, surfactants suppresses throughput process 3 times higher than surfactant system under flow conditions. Second, insensitivity makes it possible samples having different composition viscosities without change channel order maintain same degree corresponding assay accuracy.