Sharif Digital Repository

Achieving high efficiency and throughput in droplet-based mixing over a small characteristic length, such as microfluidic channels, is one of the crucial parameters in Lab-on-a-Chip (LOC) applications. One solution to achieve efficient mixing is to use active mixers in which an external power source is utilized to mix two fluids. One of these active methods is magnetic micromixers using ferrofluid. In this technique, magnetic nanoparticles are used to make one phase responsive to magnetic force, and then by applying a magnetic field, two fluid phases, one of which is magneto-responsive, will sufficiently mix. In this study, we investigated the effect of the magnetic field’s characteristics... 

We have used the Maxwell-Stefan diffusion theory to model the mass transfer between tertiary-injected gas and residual oil blocked by water, in order to predict the time required for the rupture of the water barrier due to oil swelling. We have also designed and conducted a set of visualization micromodel experiments on various pure and multicomponent oil-gas systems to measure the water rupture time in tertiary gas injection processes. The experimental results show that the initial pressure and dimensions of the system, the oil and gas composition, and the gas solubility in water control the oil swelling process. The experimentally measured rupture times are then employed to evaluate the... 

Droplet breakup in symmetric T-junctions is one of the important phenomena in droplet microfluidics. Many studies have been done about the droplet breakup but none of them has provided a general analytical solution for the droplet breakup. In this study, we present an analytical solution to investigate the effect of important parameters such as the capillary number, droplet length, and channel widths ratio. The analytical solution is validated using the numerical simulation. Using the analytical equation and numerical results, we propose a generalized relationship. This general equation can be used as a rule of thumb for droplet breakup predictions with high accuracy. The results indicate... 

Droplet microfluidics is a platform of microfluidics in which two immiscible fluids are used to generate droplets for various biomedical applications. This platform introduces several advantages in applications such as cell lysis, cell culture, co-culture, and cell encapsulation. The most important issues regarding droplet generation devices are the fabrication complexity and maintenance of these devices. In this study, a simple and easy-to-fabricate microdroplet generator is designed and fabricated to resolve these issues. Furthermore, since this device is easy to fabricate and use, it can play a key role in the fabrication of medical devices for controlling infectious diseases in poor and... 

Droplet-based microfluidic systems have been employed to manipulate discrete fluid volumes with immiscible phases. Creating the fluid droplets at microscale has led to a paradigm shift in mixing, sorting, encapsulation, sensing, and designing high throughput devices for biomedical applications. Droplet microfluidics has opened many opportunities in microparticle synthesis, molecular detection, diagnostics, drug delivery, and cell biology. In the present review, we first introduce standard methods for droplet generation (i.e. passive and active methods) and discuss the latest examples of emulsification and particle synthesis approaches enabled by microfluidic platforms. Then, the applications... 

Droplet-based microfluidics is an attractive approach for producing microgels due to its high potential to control the size and shape of the particles and precisely entrap the substances within the hydrogel matrix. However, the microfluidic generation of monodisperse microgels with desired structures is still challenging. Indeed, the rheological and interfacial properties of the immiscible fluids, as well as the adopted gelling strategy, play important roles in microfluidic methods. Herein, sodium alginate droplets with different concentrations are generated via a microfluidic device with a flow-focusing unit. Besides, a combined in situ and ex situ strategy is optimized to crosslink sodium... 

Surfaces with special wettability have aroused lots of attention due to their broad applications in many fields. In this work, we systematically report selective and various fabrications of nanofluids based on readily available materials such as SiO2 nanoparticles and polydimethylsiloxane to create superhydrophobic, superoleophobic, superhydrophilic/superoleophobic, and underwater superoleophobic coatings. The efficiency of prepared coatings is investigated on mineral rock plates as porous substrates via the straightforward and cost-effective solution-immersion technique. The static water contact angle of 170°, effortless bouncing of water droplets, and self-cleaning property with a near... 

The deformation and breakup dynamics of a compound ferrofluid droplet under shear flow and uniform magnetic field are numerically studied in this paper. Utilizing magnetic field provides the possibility to obtain better control over the compound droplet morphology and breakup in a simple shear flow. To solve the governing equations for interfaces motion and hydrodynamics, the conservative phase field lattice Boltzmann model is employed, and a finite difference approach is applied for calculating the magnetic field. To verify the accuracy of present simulations, the results are validated with those of four relevant benchmarks including liquid lens between two stratified fluids, three-phase... 

Improving the discharge process of phase change materials (PCMs) is of great importance and can be effective for thermal energy storage (TES) systems. In this research, the direct-contact method for acetone droplet on molten paraffin is optimized to enhance the efficiency of the discharge process of PCMs and TES systems working with intermediate boiling fluid (IBF). In order to improve the storage rate and increase the freezing rate in the system, the NSGA-II algorithm is used. When the acetone droplet hits, owing to its low boiling point relative to the temperature of molten paraffin, the acetone evaporates, causing the creation of solidified paraffin area. The main goal of the current... 

Human-generated droplets constitute the main route for the transmission of coronavirus. However, the details of such transmission in enclosed environments are yet to be understood. This is because geometrical and environmental parameters can immensely complicate the problem and turn the conventional analyses inefficient. As a remedy, this work develops a predictive tool based on computational fluid dynamics and machine learning to examine the distribution of sneezing droplets in realistic configurations. The time-dependent effects of environmental parameters, including temperature, humidity and ventilation rate, upon the droplets with diameters between 1 and 250μm are investigated inside a... 

The dynamics of droplet detachment from a surface is a fundamental topic studied in coating engineering, fluid mechanics, and subsurface engineering applications. This topic has direct relevance to wettability alteration using the modified ionic composition of water in contact with oil droplet, low salinity waterflooding (LSWF). Previous experimental studies of LSWF have shown a very long timescale in wettability alteration which cannot be explained using bulk diffusion coefficient. In the present study, we address both the time scale of detachment, as well as the impact of buoyancy and interfacial forces (referred to as Bond number) on droplet detachment by proposing an advanced... 

Microfluidics is a promising approach for the facile and large-scale fabrication of monodispersed droplets for various applications in biomedicine. This technology has demonstrated great potential to address the limitations of regenerative medicine. Microfluidics provides safe, accurate, reliable, and cost-effective methods for encapsulating different stem cells, gametes, biomaterials, biomolecules, reagents, genes, and nanoparticles inside picoliter-sized droplets or droplet-derived microgels for different applications. Moreover, microenvironments made using such droplets can mimic niches of stem cells for cell therapy purposes, simulate native extracellular matrix (ECM) for tissue... 

Nanofluids are widely used as the continuous phase during droplet formation in microsystems due to their impressive features such as excellent thermal, magnetic, and interfacial properties. Although it is well-known that nanofluids are susceptible to exhibit non-Newtonian behavior even at a low concentration of nanoparticles, effects of non-Newtonian behavior of nanofluids have not been studied on droplet formation thus far. In this study, oil-in-water droplet formation with a relatively high viscosity ratio of the immiscible phases was studied numerically in a T-junction microchannel. To inspect the non-Newtonian effects of aqueous nanofluids on droplet formation, empirical data on the... 

Numerous applications in engineering and biotechnology have attracted the attention of many researchers to the analysis of underlying physical phenomena during the droplet pinch-off. In this study, the neck evolution during the formation of a ferrofluid droplet from a capillary is investigated under two types of magnetic field for a drop-on-demand system. The two types are steady and Pulse-Width Modulated (PWM) magnetic fields. First, under steady magnetic field, the necking process is studied for different values of magnetic Bond number and various angles between magnetic coil centerline and gravity. Subsequently, self-similar behavior in the vicinity of the detachment moment is observed.... 

Micro-magnetofluidics offers a promising tool to regulate the drop formation process with versatile applications in engineering and biomedicine. In the present study, on-demand ferrofluid drop generation at a T-junction is investigated utilizing a magnetic pulse. Also, a novel method for ferrofluid droplet formation is introduced using a non-uniform Pulse-Width Modulation (PWM) magnetic field. A novel mechanism of drop generation named “beating regime” was seen for the first time in which the ferrofluid moves back and forth before the breakup. The effect of the magnetic induction, continuous phase flow rate, duty cycle, and applied frequency on the generation frequency and drop diameter was... 

Microfluidic systems are an interesting topic for investigation due to their wide-spreading applications. Nowadays, polymeric solutions are used mainly for the generation of microparticles in biomedical engineering, food, and pharmaceutical industries. Droplet-based microfluidic devices have proposed an extensive interest in many applications such as chemical/biological/nanomaterial preparation to understand deeply the droplet size and formation in microchannels. However, numerous experimental and numerical studies have been done for oil-water combination, polymeric solutions behavior in the presence of oil has not been investigated widely. Therefore, it is important to understand the... 

In this study, droplet generation in a T-junction fluidic channel device was studied by using electrowetting actuation with the consideration of different droplet forming regimes. For this purpose, the finite element method (FEM) was used to solve the unsteady Naiver-Stokes equation. In addition, the level set method was applied to capture the interface between two phases. It was shown that there was a good agreement between obtained data and other work during the process of droplet generation in the absence of electrowetting actuation which results in the decrease in the size of the droplet with increasing the velocity ratios. In the shearing regime, the effectiveness of electrowetting on... 

Researchers usually simplify their simulations by considering the Newtonian fluid assumption in microfluidic devices. However, it is essential to study the behavior of real non-Newtonian fluids in such systems. Moreover, using the external electric or magnetic fields in these systems can be very beneficial for manipulating the droplet size. This study considers the simulation of the process of non-Newtonian droplets’ formation under the influence of an external electric field. The novelty of this study is the use of a shear-thinning fluid as the droplet phase in this process, which has been less studied despite its numerous applications. The effects of an external electric field on this... 

Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is a powerful tool for nucleic acid amplification and quantification. However, long thermocycling time is a major limitation of the commercial PCR devices in the point-of-care (POC). Herein, we have developed a rapid droplet-based photonic PCR (dpPCR) system, including a gold (Au) nanofilm-based microfluidic chip and a plasmonic photothermal cycler. The chip is fabricated by adding mineral oil to uncured polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) to suppress droplet evaporation in PDMS microfluidic chips during PCR thermocycling. A PDMS to gold bonding technique using a double-sided adhesive tape is applied to enhance the bonding strength between the oil-added PDMS and the... 

In this study, ferrofluid droplet formation from a nozzle in the presence of a non-uniform Pulse-Width Modulated (PWM) magnetic field with different angles was studied experimentally. A Drop-on-Demand platform was introduced and three different regimes of droplet formation were observed. The regime map of the droplet formation was presented. A new type of droplet formation evolution was observed in which the droplet is formed while it is swinging around the nozzle, and the satellite droplet is not generated in this regime. The effects of five important parameters including magnetic flux density, applied magnetic frequency, duty cycle, distance between the nozzle and the center of the upper...