The advent of microfluidics, especially with the integration of droplet-based systems, has led to significant innovations and outstanding applications in many fields. While this field of study has grown increasingly over the years, the conventional method of fabricating these devices has discouraged their large-scale production, making their commercialization almost impossible. This is because traditional methods of producing droplet-based microfluidics are mostly time-consuming and labor-intensive and involve multiple processes. The emergence of 3D printing has found its application in microfluidics, providing an avenue for ease of fabrication with the aim of overcoming the limitations of conventional methods. While previous studies focused on studying the role of 3D printing in microfluidics, no study has categorically focused on the application of additive manufacturing to droplet-based microfluidics. This paper reviews the various 3D printing techniques associated with droplet-based microfluidics. Furthermore, we identify the salient features, limitations, and material properties of each printing technique while providing certain projections about their future application.

Droplet microfluidics, which is the manipulation and handling of fluid in microscale channels, has excellent applications in material science, chemical synthesis, genetic analysis, drug discovery and delivery, organ on chips, and tissue engineering. Consequently, this field has attracted significant attention from both academic institutions and industries. However, one of the major constraints is increasing the droplet production rate from a single generator to thousands of generators in order to move from a laboratory scale to industrial standards. Although the scale-up method (in this case, parallelization) of droplet production using theoretical calculations has been extensively investigated, it has been discovered to be occasionally unreliable during experiments. The use of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation, which has recently been applied to droplet microfluidics, has helped to determine the exact factors and conditions required for uniform droplet formation in flow-focusing devices. Thus far, there has been limited study on the simulation of distribution structures that effectively supply fluids to microfluidic devices in parallel orientation. In this study, CFD is used to provide detailed insights into the conditions required to achieve uniform fluid distribution in the delivery and/or distribution channel of microfluidic devices, and experimental analysis is used to further validate the findings.

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