Abstract
AbstractUnderstanding the fluid-structure interaction is crucial for an optimal design and manufacturing of soft mesoscale materials. Multi-core emulsions are a class of soft fluids assembled from cluster configurations of deformable oil-water double droplets (cores), often employed as building-blocks for the realisation of devices of interest in bio-technology, such as drug-delivery, tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. Here, we study the physics of multi-core emulsions flowing in microfluidic channels and report numerical evidence of a surprisingly rich variety of driven non-equilibrium states (NES), whose formation is caused by a dipolar fluid vortex triggered by the sheared structure of the flow carrier within the microchannel. The observed dynamic regimes range from long-lived NES at low core-area fraction, characterised by a planetary-like motion of the internal drops, to short-lived ones at high core-area fraction, in which a pre-chaotic motion results from multi-body collisions of inner drops, as combined with self-consistent hydrodynamic interactions. The onset of pre-chaotic behavior is marked by transitions of the cores from one vortex to another, a process that we interpret as manifestations of the system to maximize its entropy by filling voids, as they arise dynamically within the capsule.
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Subject
General Physics and Astronomy,General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology,General Chemistry
Reference69 articles.
1. Utada, A. S. et al. Monodisperse double emulsions generated from a microcapillary device. Science 308, 537–541 (2005).
2. Chu, L. Y., Utada, A. S., Shah, R. K., Kim, J. W. & Weitz, D. A. Controllable monodisperse multiple emulsions. Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 46, 8970 (2007).
3. Hanson, J. A. et al. Nanoscale double emulsions stabilized by single-component block copolypeptides. Nature 455, 85 (2008).
4. Abate, A. R. & Weitz, D. A. High-order multiple emulsions formed in poly(dimethylsiloxane) microfluidics. Small 5, 20302032 (2009).
5. Wang, W. et al. Controllable microfluidic production of multicomponent multiple emulsions. Lab Chip 11, 1587 (2011).
Cited by
24 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献