Production of uniformly sized emulsion drops at high production rates using asymmetric micro channel plates

The purpose of this work was to investigate maximum disperse phase flux required for production of monodisperse drops in a straight-through microchannel (MC) array device. The experiments have been carried out using single-crystal silicon MC plate consisting of about 23,000 asymmetric MCs fabricated by photolithography and deep reactive ion etching (DRIE). Each MC consisted of a rectangular 50×10 μm slot and a circular 10 μm-diameter hole in the middle of each slot. A depth of the hole was 70 μm and the slot depth was 30 μm. The dispersed phase was soybean oil, MCT (middle-chain fatty acid triglyceride) oil and n-tetradecane with a viscosity at 293 K of 50, 20, and 2.7 mPa·s, respectively. The continuous phase was 2 wt% Tween 20 or SDS. (Continues...).