Generation of water-in-oil and oil-in-water microdroplets in polyester-toner microfluidic devices

TL;DR

This study shows that inexpensive polyester-toner microfluidic devices can reliably produce highly uniform water-in-oil and oil-in-water droplets without surface treatment, using surfactants and simple T-junction designs.

Contribution

It introduces a cost-effective, disposable microfluidic platform capable of generating monodisperse emulsions without surface modification.

Findings

Produced highly monodisperse droplets with less than 2% size variation.

Achieved droplet generation at frequencies up to 500 Hz.

Demonstrated stable droplet production over several hours.

Abstract

This paper demonstrates that disposable polyester-toner microfluidic devices are suitable to produce either water-in-oil (W/O) or oil-in-water (O/W) droplets without using any surface treatment of the microchannels walls. Highly monodisperse W/O and O/W emulsions were generated in T-junction microdevices by simply adding appropriate surfactants to the continuous phase. The dispersion in size of droplets generated at frequencies up to 500 Hz was always less than about 2% over time intervals of a couple of hours.