Oil-in-Water fL Droplets by Interfacial Spontaneous Fragmentation and Their Electrical Characterization.
Langmuir
; 35(14): 4936-4945, 2019 04 09.
Article
em En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-30875226
ABSTRACT
Inkjet printing is here employed for the first time as a method to produce femtoliter-scale oil droplets dispersed in water. In particular, picoliter-scale fluorinated oil (FC40) droplets are printed in the presence of perfluoro-1-octanol surfactant at a velocity higher than 5 m/s. Femtoliter-scale oil droplets in water are spontaneously formed through a fragmentation process at the water/air interface using minute amounts of nonionic surfactant (down to 0.003% v/v of Tween 80). This fragmentation occurs by a Plateau-Rayleigh mechanism at a moderately high Weber number (101). A microfluidic chip with integrated microelectrodes allows droplets characterization in terms of number and diameter distribution (peaked at about 3 µm) by means of electrical impedance measurements. These results show an unprecedented possibility to scale oil droplets down to the femtoliter scale, which opens up several perspectives for a tailored oil-in-water emulsion fabrication for drug encapsulation, pharmaceutic preparations, and cellular biology.
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MEDLINE
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En
Ano de publicação:
2019
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Article