Drop Deformation in Microconfined Shear Flow

Abstract

The deformation and breakup of a drop in an immiscible equiviscous liquid undergoing unbounded shear flow has been extensively investigated in the literature, starting from the pioneering work of Taylor. In this Letter, we address the case of microconfined shear flow, a problem which is relevant for microfluidics and emulsion processing applications. The main effects of confinement include complex oscillating transients and drop stabilization against breakup. In particular, very elongated drop shapes are observed, which would be unstable in the unbounded case and can be explained in terms of wall-induced distortion of the shear flow field. We show that wall effects can be exploited to obtain nearly monodisperse emulsions in microconfined shear flow.