Chemically induced coalescence in droplet-based microfluidics

Abstract

We present a new microfluidic method to coalesce pairs of surfactant-stabilized water-in-fluorocarbon oil droplets. We achieve this through the local addition of a poor solvent for the surfactant, perfluorobutanol, which induces cohesion between droplet interfaces causing them to merge. The efficiency of this technique is comparable to existing techniques providing an alternative method to coalesce pairs of droplets.