High-throughput formation and control of monodisperse liquid crystals droplets driven by an alternating current electric field in a microfluidic device

Abstract

We investigate the effect of an applied ac high voltage on a confined stable nematic liquid crystal (LC) in a microfluidic device and show that this actuation leads to the formation of highly monodisperse microdroplets with an unexpected constant mean size over a large interval of the forcing frequency F and with a droplets production frequency f≃2F. We show also that despite the nonlinear feature of the droplets formation mechanism, droplets size, and size distribution are governed simply by the LC flow rate Qd and the forcing frequency F.