Water-in-oil droplets have huge importance in chemical and biotechnology applications, despite their difficulty being produced in microfluidics. Moreover, existing studies focus more on the different shape of microchannels instead of their size, which is one of the critical factors that can influence flow characteristics of the droplets. Therefore, the present work aims to study the behaviours of water-in-oil droplets at the interfacial surface in an offset T-junction microchannel, having different radiuses, using micro-PIV software. Food-grade palm olein and distilled water seeded with polystyrene microspheres particles were used as working fluids, and their captured images showing their generated droplets’ behaviours focused on the junction of the respective microfluidic channel, i.e., radiuses of 400 µm, 500 µm, 750 µm and 1000 µm, were analysed via PIVlab. The increasing in the radius of the offset T-junction microchannel leads to the increase in the cross-sectional area and the decrease in the distilled water phase’s velocity. The experimental velocity of the water droplet is in agreement with theoretical values, having a minimal difference as low as 0.004 mm/s for the case of the microchannel with a radius of 750 µm. In summary, a small increase in the channel’s size yields a significant increase in the overall flow of a liquid.
Micromixing process in microfluidic devices has been broadly employed in bio-, nano-, and environmental technologies using either miscible or immiscible liquids. However, there are limited experimental studies investigating the mixing process of different densities and viscosities liquids in relation to microfluidics. Therefore, the mixing process of propan-2-ol and water, water and sodium chloride solution, propan-2-ol and sodium chloride solution were experimented and reported at 5 ≤ Re ≤ 50 in T-junction and offset T-junction microchannels. For miscible mixing experiments, i.e. propan-2-ol and water, water and sodium chloride solution, both microchannels show mixing index for each Reynolds number is directly proportional to the mixing time. At low Reynolds number, higher molecular diffusion takes place while at low flow rate, the residence time of fluid is high. The mixing performance is relatively good at high Reynolds number of 40 and 50 due to the significant convection which is caused by the effect of stretching and thinning of liquid lamellae. For immiscible propan-2-ol and sodium chloride solution mixing, offset T-junction microchannel offers better mixing performance than T-junction microchannel at both low and high Reynolds number. The chaotic mixing happened at the intersection of the T-junction microchannel due to the direct interaction of two liquids entering the junction at high momentum.
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