Oil-in-water microfluidics on the colloidal scale: new routes to self-assembly and glassy packings

TL;DR

This paper introduces NOA-based microfluidic devices capable of producing highly monodisperse oil-in-water emulsions with micron-scale droplets, enabling advanced colloidal studies and revealing new insights into self-assembly and glassy packings.

Contribution

Development of NOA flow focusing microfluidic devices for producing micron-scale, highly monodisperse oil-in-water emulsions for colloidal research.

Findings

Produced emulsions with droplet radii from 2 to 12 μm

Achieved polydispersity as low as 5%

Enabled detailed 3D structural analysis of colloidal systems

Abstract

We have developed Norland Optical Adhesive (NOA) flow focusing devices, making use of the excellent solvent compatibility and surface properties of NOA to generate micron scale oil-in-water emulsions with polydispersities as low as 5%. While current work on microfluidic oil-in-water emulsification largely concerns the production of droplets with sizes on the order of 10s of micrometres, large enough that Brownian motion is negligible, our NOA devices can produce droplets with radii ranging from 2 {\mu}m to 12 {\mu}m. To demonstrate the utility of these emulsions as colloidal model systems we produce fluorescently labelled polydimethylsiloxane droplets suitable for particle resolved studies with confocal microscopy. We analyse the structure of the resulting emulsion in 3D using coordinate tracking and the topological cluster classification and reveal a new mono-disperse thermal system.