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Updated: Jul 11, 2026

Glass-Based Devices to Generate Drops and Emulsions
Published on: April 5, 2022
Dripping to jetting transitions in coflowing liquid streams
Andrew S Utada1, Alberto Fernandez-Nieves, Howard A Stone
1Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA.
Abstract:
A liquid forced through an orifice into an immiscible fluid ultimately breaks into drops due to surface tension. Drop formation can occur right at the orifice in a dripping process. Alternatively, the inner fluid can form a jet, which breaks into drops further downstream. The transition from dripping to jetting is not understood for coflowing fluid streams, unlike the case of drop formation in air. We show that in a coflowing stream this transition can be characterized by a state diagram that depends on the capillary number of the outer fluid and the Weber number of the inner fluid.
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