Title

Droplet formation via squeezing mechanism in a microfluidic flow-focusing device

Authors

Authors

A. Gupta; H. S. Matharoo; D. Makkar;R. Kumar

Comments

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Abbreviated Journal Title

Comput. Fluids

Keywords

Lattice Boltzmann; Microfluidics; Flow-focusing; Droplet formation; T-JUNCTION; FLUID; BREAK; Computer Science, Interdisciplinary Applications; Mechanics

Abstract

In this work, the formation of droplets in a microfluidic flow-focusing device is studied and presented. Spurious velocities at the fluid-fluid interface were found to be very small in the lattice Boltzmann simulations. Using this technique, simulations have been performed to study the effect of geometry on formation of droplets for a microfluidic flow-focusing device. The effect of orifice width, orifice length and distance of the orifice on the mechanism of droplet formation and size of droplets is presented for different Capillary numbers. It is shown that, for Ca < < 1, creation of droplets proceeds through the squeezing process that has earlier been observed in the T-junction configuration. The size of droplets increases with an increase in the (a) width, and (b) distance of orifice from the inlet. On increasing orifice length, droplet size first decreases to a minimum and increases thereafter. This study also reveals that the size of droplets becomes independent and approaches a constant beyond a critical value of the orifice length. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Journal Title

Computers & Fluids

Volume

100

Publication Date

1-1-2014

Document Type

Article

Language

English

First Page

218

Last Page

226

WOS Identifier

WOS:000339775500020

ISSN

0045-7930

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