Encapsulation of Concentrated Magnetic Particles via Microfluidic Droplet Splitting

Droplet microfluidics has received significant recent research interest in different processes and applications such as biology or material synthesis. The droplets provide an isolated capsule for the particles instead of the experiment environment. Many of these processes need a high concentration of target particles inside the droplets for specific applications or downstream analysis. There are various active and passive methods to manipulate the particles inside the droplets. This paper proposes an active method based on magnetic to generate concentrated magnetic particles encapsulated inside a droplet through a two-stage process. First, droplets are generated at a T-junction in a squeezing regime as it produces a mono-dispersed and relatively large volume of droplets. Once produced, droplets containing both magnetic and nonmagnetic particles are exposed to a magnetic field in the downstream followed by splitting at a Y-shaped junction. This leads to the formation of smaller droplets encapsulating concentrated magnetic particles.

Keywords:

Droplet Microfluidics , Droplet Splitting , Particle encapsulation , Particle manipulation