An Interface–Particle Interaction Approach for Evaluation of the Co-Encapsulation Efficiency of Cells in a Flow-Focusing Droplet Generator

Abstract

<jats:p>Droplet-based microfluidics offers significant advantages, such as high throughput and scalability, making platforms based on this technology ideal candidates for point-of-care (POC) testing and clinical diagnosis. However, the efficiency of co-encapsulation in droplets is suboptimal, limiting the applicability of such platforms for the biosensing applications. The homogeneity of the bioanalytes in the droplets is an unsolved problem. While there is extensive literature on the experimental setups and active methods used to increase the efficiency of such platforms, passive techniques have received less attention, and their fundamentals have not been fully explored. Here, we develop a novel passive technique for investigating cell encapsulation using the finite element method (FEM). The level set method was used to track the interfaces of forming droplets. The effects of walls and the droplet interfaces on relatively large cells were calculated to track them more accurately during encapsulation. The static surface tension force was used to account for the effects of the interfaces on cells. The results revealed that the pairing efficiency is highly sensitive to the standard deviation (SD) of the distance between the cells in the entrance channel. The pairing efficiency prediction error of our model differed by less than 5% from previous experiments. The proposed model can be used to evaluate the performance of droplet-based microfluidic devices to ensure higher precision for co-encapsulation of cells.</jats:p>

Hydrogels for Single-Cell Microgel Production: Recent Advances and Applications

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Microneedle Arrays for Sampling and Sensing Skin Interstitial Fluid

“…Alternatively, microfluidic technology can address the limitations associated with conventional ISF sampling techniques. Microfluidics is an emerging science and technology that can offer significant improvements over various fields, including surface science [15], porous systems [16], nanotechnology for disease diagnosis [17], mixing [18], and separation [19,20], mechanobiology [21], cancer research [22,23], cell culture [24,25], single-cell analysis [26], drug delivery at cellular [27] and tissue levels [28], electrochemical biosensing [29], and POC sensing [30]. Furthermore, the emerging field of micro elastofluidics can provide microfluidic solutions for a flexible, conformal system attached to the skin [27].…”

On-demand ferrofluid droplet formation with non-linear magnetic permeability in the presence of high non-uniform magnetic fields

“…Many studies have focused on droplet deformation, breakup, and generation for about a century due to their widespread applications and rich underlying physics. The dynamics of droplet formation has been investigated numerically, experimentally, and theoretically in different geometries, including nozzles 1 and lab-on-a-chip systems 2 . Droplet generation has been utilized in various applications, such as 3D printing 3 , electrosprays 4 , and bioengineering 5 .…”