Emulsification with microstructured devices

Emulsions (dispersions of droplets of one immiscible liquid e.g. oil into the other e.g. water) are important in many industries including foods, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals and petrochemicals. Traditional machines used for emulsification are highly energy inefficient and provide poor control over droplet size and product properties. Microfluidic systems, through their well-defined pores, produce highly monodispersed droplets, size of which can be controlled through pore geometry. Additionally, they require less energy (a factor of 10-100 less) as compared to traditional machines. The productivity of the microfluidic systems is not sufficient to be applicable at industrial scale due to the lack of research on parallelization and construction materials. Our work on metal based microfluidic EDGE (Edge based Droplet GEneration) systems was an effort to take these systems a step forward towards industrial applications. Our results showed that the metal based EDGE systems provide excellent stability and good productivity and hence are suitable for large scale applications.