Inertia-driven jetting regimes in microfluidic coflows

Abstract

Microfluidics have been used extensively for the study of flows of immiscible fluids, with a specific focus on the effects of interfacial forces on flow behavior. In comparison, inertia-driven flow of confined coflowing fluids has received scant attention at the microscale, despite the fact that the effects of microscale confinement are expected to influence inertia-driven flow behavior as observed in free jets. Herein, we report three distinct modes for breakup of coflowing, confined, microscale jets: the conventional Rayleigh mode and two additional inertia-driven modes occurring at higher Reynolds number flows, namely, a sinuous wave breakup and an atomizationlike mode. Each of the three modes is differentiated by a characteristic droplet size, size distribution, and dependence of the jet length as a function of the external fluid velocity (vext). A unified phase diagram is proposed to categorize the jet breakup mechanisms and their transitions using, as a scale-up factor, the ratio of the jet inertial forces to the sum of the viscous and interfacial forces for both the inner and outer fluids. These results provide fundamental insights into the flow behavior of microscale-confined coflowing jets.