Drop Deformation in Microconfined Shear Flow

Vincenzo Sibillo, Gilberto Pasquariello, Marino Simeone, Vittorio Cristini, and Stefano Guido
Phys. Rev. Lett. 97, 054502 – Published 2 August 2006

Abstract

The deformation and breakup of a drop in an immiscible equiviscous liquid undergoing unbounded shear flow has been extensively investigated in the literature, starting from the pioneering work of Taylor. In this Letter, we address the case of microconfined shear flow, a problem which is relevant for microfluidics and emulsion processing applications. The main effects of confinement include complex oscillating transients and drop stabilization against breakup. In particular, very elongated drop shapes are observed, which would be unstable in the unbounded case and can be explained in terms of wall-induced distortion of the shear flow field. We show that wall effects can be exploited to obtain nearly monodisperse emulsions in microconfined shear flow.

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  • Received 12 March 2006

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.97.054502

©2006 American Physical Society

Authors & Affiliations

Vincenzo Sibillo1, Gilberto Pasquariello1, Marino Simeone1, Vittorio Cristini2, and Stefano Guido1,*

  • 1Dipartimento di Ingegneria Chimica, Università di Napoli Federico II, Napoli 80125, Italy
  • 2Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of California, Irvine, California 92697, USA

  • *Email address: stefano.guido@unina.it

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Vol. 97, Iss. 5 — 4 August 2006

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