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Suppression of instabilities in multiphase flow by geometric confinement

Katherine J. Humphry¹, Armand Ajdari^2,*, Alberto Fernández-Nieves^1,3,†, Howard A. Stone³, and David A. Weitz^1,3,‡

¹Department of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA
²“Gulliver,” CNRS-ESPCI, UMR 7083, 75005 Paris, France
³School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA

^*armand.adjari@saint-gobain.com
^†Present address: School of Physics, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332, USA.
^‡weitz@seas.harvard.edu

Phys. Rev. E 79, 056310 – Published 18 May, 2009

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.79.056310

Abstract

We investigate the effect of confinement on drop formation in microfluidic devices. The presence or absence of drop formation is studied for two immiscible coflowing liquids in a microfluidic channel, where the channel width is considerably larger than the channel height. We show that stability of the inner fluid thread depends on the channel geometry: when the width of the inner fluid is comparable to or larger than the channel height, hydrodynamic instabilities are suppressed, and a stable jet that does not break into drops results; otherwise, the inner fluid breaks into drops, in either a dripping or jetting regime. We present a model that accounts for the data and experimentally exploit this effect of geometric confinement to induce the breakup of a jet at a spatially defined location.

Article Text

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