High-volume production of single and compound emulsions in a microfluidic parallelization arrangement coupled with coaxial annular world-to-chip interfaces

Abstract

This study describes a microfluidic platform with coaxial annular world-to-chip interfaces for high-throughput production of single and compound emulsion droplets, having controlled sizes and internal compositions. The production module consists of two distinct elements: a planar square chip on which many copies of a microfluidic droplet generator (MFDG) are arranged circularly, and a cubic supporting module with coaxial annular channels for supplying fluids evenly to the inlets of the mounted chip, assembled from blocks with cylinders and holes. Three-dimensional flow was simulated to evaluate the distribution of flow velocity in the coaxial multiple annular channels. By coupling a 1.5 cm × 1.5 cm microfluidic chip with parallelized 144 MFDGs and a supporting module with two annular channels, for example, we could produce simple oil-in-water (O/W) emulsion droplets having a mean diameter of 90.7 μm and a coefficient of variation (CV) of 2.2% at a throughput of 180.0 mL h⁻¹. Furthermore, we successfully demonstrated high-throughput production of Janus droplets, double emulsions and triple emulsions, by coupling 1.5 cm × 1.5 cm – 4.5 cm × 4.5 cm microfluidic chips with parallelized 32–128 MFDGs of various geometries and supporting modules with 3–4 annular channels.