Experimental study on a solenoid valve-based generator for droplet generation

Abstract

Abstract An on-demand droplet generator is developed based on a high-speed and 2-way solenoid valve and studied experimentally in this paper. It is found that the valve-based droplet generator has good controllability, repeatability and stability. Under a suitable applied pressure, a single droplet can be generated by opening the valve with a short voltage pulse. Besides, the droplet size can be conveniently controlled by the applied liquid pressure and pulse width of the control signal. The results show that the present device successes to avoid the limitation of an appropriate outlet pressure required at nozzle tip for most droplet generators in the literature and is capable of producing droplets in a wide size range for a fixed nozzle diameter.