Centrifugal Step Emulsification can Produce Water in Oil Emulsions with Extremely High Internal Volume Fractions

Abstract

The high throughput preparation of emulsions with high internal volume fractions is important for many different applications, e.g., drug delivery. However, most emulsification techniques reach only low internal volume fractions and need stable flow rates that are often difficult to control. Here, we present a centrifugal high throughput step emulsification disk for the fast and easy production of emulsions with high internal volume fractions above 95%. The disk produces droplets at generation rates of up to 3700 droplets/s and, for the first time, enables the generation of emulsions with internal volume fractions of >97%. The coefficient of variation between droplet sizes is very good (4%). We apply our system to show the in situ generation of gel emulsion. In the future, the recently introduced unit operation of centrifugal step emulsification may be used for the high throughput production of droplets as reaction compartments for clinical diagnostics or as starting material for micromaterial synthesis.

Keywords

• droplet
• high-throughput
• centrifugal step emulsification
• step emulsification
• centrifugal microfluidics
• internal phase ratio
• internal volume fraction
• high internal phase ratio emulsion (HIPRE)