Facile and Scalable Rotation-Based Microfluidics for Controllable Production of Emulsions, Microparticles, and Microfibers

Abstract

A rotation-based microfluidic system with simple device setup and flow manipulation is developed for facile production of controllable emulsion droplets and liquid jets as well as functional microparticles and microfibers. The system consists of a vertically fixed injection tube and a rotating container. This system allows controllable production of single emulsion droplets and single-phase jets with adjustable uniform sizes, and predictable scale-up performance via numbering-up capillary to achieve an enhanced production rate. By flexibly changing the capillary geometry, this system can controllably produce single emulsion droplets with dual-phasic and triphasic morphologies, double emulsion droplets with core–shell and multicore–shell morphologies, and dual-phasic Janus jets. Moreover, this system can controllably fabricate versatile microparticles and microfibers from their droplet and jet templates via fast solidification without microchannel blocking in the open container. This work provides a powerful platform for promoting the wide-scale impact of microfluidics in material science, chemical, and biological fields.