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Flow regime mapping for a two-phase system of aqueous alginate and water droplets in T-junction geometry

Microfluidic systems are an interesting topic for investigation due to their wide-spreading applications. Nowadays, polymeric solutions are used mainly for the generation of microparticles in biomedical engineering, food, and pharmaceutical industries. Droplet-based microfluidic devices have proposed an extensive interest in many applications such as chemical/biological/nanomaterial preparation to understand deeply the droplet size and formation in microchannels. However, numerous experimental and numerical studies have been done for oil–water combination, polymeric solutions behavior in the presence of oil has not been investigated widely. Therefore, it is important to understand the droplet formation mechanisms in a microfluidic device for both water and polymeric solutions to determine the flow regime mapping in order to control the characteristic of the produced droplets. Also, in many studies, the length of the droplets as a parameter to investigate the droplet size was studied. In this study, droplet generation in the T-shaped microfluidic junction with an enlarged horizontal outlet channel was studied to have opportunity to determine the diameter of spherical droplets. The water and the alginate 1% (w/v) solutions were used separately as a dispersed phase, and the mineral oil was used as the continuous phase in which the solution's flow rates were varied over a wide range. To perform numerical simulations of the droplet formation, a two-phase level set method was used which is a suitable method for the investigation and simulation of immiscible fluids. The flow regime mapping for the two different aqueous solutions was obtained. Furthermore, the influences of flow rates on droplet size, droplet generation frequency was quantified. In this study, flow regime, droplet size, and droplet frequency were studied. In general, flow rates of the oil and aqueous fluids readily control five main flow regimes including backflow, laminar flow, dripping flow, squeezing flow, jetting flow, and fluctuated flow. It was observed that generated droplets with alginate solution as dispersed phase were more in the region of the jetting flow regime while water droplets were more in the region of the dripping flow regime, this can be due to the difference in characteristics of polymeric solution and water. For both aqueous phases, larger droplets were obtained when flow rates of oil were decreased and aqueous phases were increased. Also, the frequency of droplet generation increases and decreases by increasing oil phase flow rate and increasing aqueous phase flow rate, respectively. In the same flow rates of aqueous phase and oil, the sizes of water droplets are larger than the alginate droplets and also water has a higher frequency of droplet generation compared to alginate. Finally, we characterized all the obtained data for flow regimes due to the capillary number (Ca) of the continuous phase. The findings of this study can help for better understanding of the detailed process of droplet generation of water and alginate solution as dispersed phase separately with mineral oil as the continuous phase in a T-junction geometry microfluidic and know the effect of characteristics of solutions as a dispersed flow in flow regimes.