Flow regime mapping of high inertial gas–liquid droplet microflows in flow-focusing geometries

Confined gas–liquid droplet microflows present a lot of new perspectives for microfluidic systems that require the presence of a gaseous phase. In addition to the benefits associated with the discretization of reactive and sensing processes, the highly inertial droplets generated in these systems can enable fast efficient mixing by pair collisions as well as high system throughput due to the short convective timescales involved in the droplet transport. Presented herein is mapping of the geometry-specific droplet generation from a binary gas–liquid flow for different flow-focusing configurations. The dynamic interactions of inertia, shear stress, viscous and surface tension forces create three unique regimes in the gas–liquid flow rate space, providing adaptable flow configuration to specific applications. Analytical investigation and numerical analyses involving governing forces are also introduced to predict the effective droplet diameter versus gas flow rate. We found that the experimental results were well matched to the analytical predictions within 10 % of uncertainty.