About a Membrane with Microfluidic Porous-Wall Channels of Cylindrical Shape for Droplet Formation

A low-energy emulsification process is hollow-fiber emulsification. In this process, the lumen diameter of the membrane mostly determines the droplet size. To gain smaller droplets, approaches for downsizing the inner diameter of membranes have to be carried out. In this work, we describe a new method for the fabrication of parallel microfluidic porous-wall channels of a homogeneous cylindrical shape with lumen diameters down to 7 μm. Parallel and symmetric porous-wall channels are induced into polyvinylidene fluoride membranes during the casting process. The technique comprises liquid-induced phase separation and phase-separation micromolding using thin glass and carbon fibers as molds and an in-house designed tool to position the fibers. The channel positioning and alignment are verified within this work. We show and investigate the droplet formation in these porous-wall channels via hollow-fiber emulsification. The formed droplets are very small in diameter and size distribution. The droplet formation at varying flow rates and channel diameters is examined in detail. Moreover, an area of sufficient operating conditions is given using Weber and capillary numbers. As a numbering-up approach, we show the simultaneous formation of spherical droplets in two parallel channels. With the proposed membrane fabrication using micromolding, we push the downscaling approach of hollow-fiber emulsification to lower micron ranges of the channel diameter. With these small channels, droplets with a diameter down to 25 μm were produced, which are more attractive for most applications.