Automated high-throughput production of monodisperse emulsions: AutoDropProd
Monodisperse emulsions are of great interest to the food industry, pharmaceutical industry, and cosmetics industry as they have increased stability and better-controlled properties compared to polydisperse ones.
Published by Dr. Remigijus Vasiliauskas.
Automated monodisperse emulsions generation: introduction
Thanks to the success of the AutoMonoDroplet project, we are now able to automate the production of specific-size droplets at rates higher than 5 kHz in microfluidic chips and precisely control their size, making monodisperse emulsions with a coefficient of variation below 0.2%.
This is achieved by measuring the droplet size using optical methods and constantly adjusting the droplet diameter by changing flow rates and pressures. We are using a fast-response flow controller system (Elveflow) to achieve the best results, thus improving the system’s performance.
Automated monodisperse emulsions generation: project description
The production of monodisperse emulsions in a single channel is already well controlled, so we will concentrate on this new project on high-volume droplet production to meet industrial needs.
We aim to apply parallelized droplet generators in combination with controlled automated droplet production to provide monodisperse emulsions despite any fluctuations in the system (for example, the clogging of a microfluidic channel or other instabilities).
Additionally, using the combination of our developed system with an adjustable chip geometry, one can produce droplets of almost any desirable size using a single chip, thus avoiding droplet size limitation imposed by the channel dimensions.
As a result, we can offer a very versatile, stable, and simple-to-use microfluidic system to generate specific-size monodisperse emulsions at an industrial scale.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 796514 (AutoDropProd).
Do you need more information? Feel free to read Remigijus’ review about droplet detection in microfluidics.
