Morphology Development During Microconfined Flow of Viscous Emulsions

Abstract

In this contribution, a brief review is given of the dynamics of emulsions in microconfined shear flow. The interest in confined flow is triggered by the increasing importance of microfluidic applications in the processing industries. In a first part, some important aspects of confinement on single droplet dynamics are highlighted. The validity of the conclusions drawn from this part are subsequently applied to more concentrated systems. It is shown that microconfined emulsions can exhibit rich dynamics, and can display some peculiar morphologies.

Keywords

• morphology
• blends
• emulsions
• microfluidics
• confinement