Lipid-Stabilized Double Emulsions Generated in Planar Microfluidic Devices
Lipid-Stabilized Double Emulsions Generated in Planar Microfluidic Devices
复制标题
DOI：
10.1021/acs.langmuir.9b03622
复制
发表时间：
2020-03-10
期刊：
影响因子：
3.9
通讯作者：
Knowles, Tuomas P. J.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Kong, Lingling;Levin, Aviad;Knowles, Tuomas P. J.
利用其化学和物理特性，微乳液已得到广泛的应用。基于微流体的方法的发展允许控制高度单分散乳液的生产，包括形成多重和分层乳液。传统的基于聚（二甲基硅氧烷）的微流体系统在用于双乳液生成时需要对表面化学进行严格的空间控制，这在微米尺度上实现是具有挑战性的。在这里，我们提出了一种二维设备设计，它可以以简单的方式选择性地进行表面处理，并通过结合两种不同的亲水性和疏水性表面特性来形成均匀的水/油/水双乳液。这些表面在空间上充分分离，以允许赋予它们功能化，而不需要光刻方法或复杂的流量控制。我们证明，连续相的润湿性要求与该方法固有的通道壁之间的不匹配可以容忍数百微米以上，这为使用简单的压力驱动流来实现表面功能化提供了可能性。该设计架构在乳液生成方面表现出强大的效率，同时保留了简单的设备制造。最后，我们通过用脂质分子作为表面活性剂生成水包油包水乳液来证明这种方法的潜力。
Microemulsions have found a wide range of applications exploiting their chemical and physical properties. Development of microfluidic-based approaches has allowed for the controlled production of highly monodispersed emulsions, including the formation of multiple and hierarchical emulsions. Conventional poly(dimethylsiloxane)-based microfluidic systems require tight spatial control over the surface chemistry when used for double emulsion generation, which can be challenging to achieve on the micrometer scale. Here, we present a two-dimensional device design, which can selectively be surface-treated in a straightforward manner and allows for the formation of uniform water/oil/water double emulsions by combining two distinct hydrophilic and hydrophobic surface properties. These surfaces are sufficiently separated in space to allow for imparting their functionalization without the requirement for lithographic approaches or complex flow control. We demonstrate that a mismatch between the wettability requirements of the continuous phase and the channel wall inherent in this approach can be tolerated over several hundreds of micrometers, opening up the possibility to use simple pressure-driven flows to achieve surface functionalization. The design architecture exhibits robust efficiency in emulsion generation while retaining simple device fabrication. We finally demonstrate the potential of this approach by generating water in oil in water emulsions with lipid molecules acting as surfactants.