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Viscoelastic Particle Encapsulation Using a Hyaluronic Acid Solution in a T-Junction Microfluidic Device
Micromachines, Volume: 14, Issue: 3, Start page: 563
Swansea University Author:
Francesco Del Giudice
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DOI (Published version): 10.3390/mi14030563
Abstract
The encapsulation of particles and cells in droplets is highly relevant in biomedical engineering as well as in material science. So far, however, the majority of the studies in this area have focused on the encapsulation of particles or cells suspended in Newtonian liquids. We here studied the part...
| Published in: | Micromachines |
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| ISSN: | 2072-666X |
| Published: |
MDPI AG
2023
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| Online Access: |
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| URI: | https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa63217 |
| Abstract: |
The encapsulation of particles and cells in droplets is highly relevant in biomedical engineering as well as in material science. So far, however, the majority of the studies in this area have focused on the encapsulation of particles or cells suspended in Newtonian liquids. We here studied the particle encapsulation phenomenon in a T-junction microfluidic device, using a non-Newtonian viscoelastic hyaluronic acid solution in phosphate buffer saline as suspending liquid for the particles. We first studied the non-Newtonian droplet formation mechanism, finding that the data for the normalised droplet length scaled as the Newtonian ones. We then performed viscoelastic encapsulation experiments, where we exploited the fact that particles self-assembled in equally-spaced structures before approaching the encapsulation area, to then identify some experimental conditions for which the single encapsulation efficiency was larger than the stochastic limit predicted by the Poisson statistics. |
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| Keywords: |
droplet microfluidics, viscoelasticity, non-newtonian liquids |
| College: |
Faculty of Science and Engineering |
| Funders: |
EPSRC |
| Issue: |
3 |
| Start Page: |
563 |