Drop breakup in a symmetric T-junction microchannel under electric field
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RESEARCH PAPER
Drop breakup in a symmetric T‑junction microchannel under electric field Iman Jafari1 · Keivan Fallah1 Received: 27 July 2020 / Accepted: 21 October 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract In the present study, the breakup process of drop in a symmetric T-junction microchannel is numerically investigated. A novel method base on imposing an electric field in the branches of the T-junction is proposed to improve the breakup process of the drop. The results are apprised by the previously published experimental and numerical research in the literature. The comparison depicts that the current results are in good agreement with the previous studies. The effects of the non-dimensional drop length (L*), electric capillary number ( Cae ), and permittivity ratio ( 𝜀∗ ) are studied in detail. The results reveal that using an electric field, the mother drop splits faster in the presence of an electric field when compared with the case without the electric field. It is also concluded that the effect of electrical field is more highlighted when drops are smaller. Furthermore, the breakup time of the drop decreases by increasing the electric capillary number and permittivity ratio. Keywords Two-phase · Symmetric T-junction microchannel · Electric field · Drop breakup
1 Introduction Drop formation in microchannels is a powerful highthroughput method that is used in versatile technological and scientific applications, such as drug screening (Guo et al. 2012) biological engineering (Abkarian et al. 2007), encapsulation (He et al. 2005), examining physical and chemical interaction (Konry et al. 2013) and DNA analysis (Burns et al. 1998). There exist different geometries for formation (Gong et al. 2010; Liu et al. 2011; Tan et al. 2014; Fallah et al. 2018; Mastiani et al. 2019), deformation (Wehking et al. 2013), and breakup of drops in asymmetric (Bedram and Moosavi 2011; Cheng et al. 2018) and symmetric (Leshansky and Pismen 2009; Chen and Deng 2017) geometries in microchannels. Some of these microfluidic schemes are asymmetric and symmetric T-junction, cross junction, flow focusing and co-flowing. Fluid properties, length of the drop, flow rates of the two immiscible fluids, and mixing geometry are * Keivan Fallah [email protected] Iman Jafari [email protected] 1
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Sari Branch, Islamic Azad University, Sari, Iran
the most important criteria to control the drop size and the breakup time in microchannels. Numerous numerical and experimental investigations have been performed to study the effects of flow conditions on drop behavior in microchannels (Bretherton 1961; Kim et al. 2007; Jullien et al. 2009; Azarmanesh and Farhadi 2016; Zhang et al. 2018; Azizian et al. 2019; Hoseinpour and Sarreshtehdari, 2020; Azarmanesh et al. 2019). Manipulation of microdrops in a microfluidic network can be achieved passively or actively where both phenomena have been extensively investigated experimentally as well as numerically (Burns et al. 19
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