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Emulsions: Principles and preparation - Making emulsions using membranes and microchannels - Microfluidic techniques

4 important questions on Emulsions: Principles and preparation - Making emulsions using membranes and microchannels - Microfluidic techniques

What are advantages of the use of micro fluidics to produce emulsions?

High energy efficiency, high droplet monodispersity, potential use for the production of high added-value and fragile products.

Which 2 micro fluidics techniques are there? And what are the differences?

Shear-based --> T-shaped --> size of droplets determined by flow of both phases in the shear-based system
Spontaneous droplet formation --> EDGE layout --> only dispersed phase should be controlled, not the continuous phase. Droplet formation time much longer, throughput lower

What are disadvantages of using micro fluidics to produce emulsions?

At an industrial level it is still very limited due to the low throughputs and challenges for upscaling.

Making emulsions for production purposes is not the only thing that microfluidics can do, what else?

These techniques can also be used for analytical purposes, for example to investigate the adsorption of emulsifiers at the surface of emulsions droplets at very short time scales.