Publication date: 5th July 2021
Although multiple emulsions have a wide range of applications in biology, medicine, chemistry and cosmetics, the use of microfluidic devices to generate them remains limited to specialist laboratories. This is because of the expertise required to design and operate these technologies. We have developed a plug-and-play microcapillary platform for the generation of multicompartmental double emulsions which only requires a low cost 3D printer for fabrication and syringe pumps for operation. Our microcapillary platform is a modular system where junction boxes fabricated from a flexible resin are used to hold and align any type of standard glass capillary or piece of tubing for droplet formation without the need for capillary alignment. The flexible resin enables total sealing of the capillaries without the need for gaskets or adhesives, and by combining glass and fluorocarbon capillaries surface treatment is not required. We have used our microcapillary platform to generate water-in-oil-in-water, oil-in-water-in-oil, and oil-in-oil-in-water multicompartmental double emulsions with between 1 and 10 inner droplets with high accuracy and reproducibility using standard oils (FC40, mineral oil) and inexpensive surfactants (sodium dodecyl sulfate, SDS or 1H,1H,2H,2H-perfluoro-1-octanol, PFO). Our microcapillary platform can also be used for the formation of binary multicompartmental double emulsions, where two types of inner phase droplets can be encapsulated in the multicompartmental emulsions. Our results demonstrate how simple and accessible tools can be employed to generate a powerful modular microcapillary platform. We anticipate that the simplicity of fabrication and operation of this platform, coupled with its ability to make a wide variety of different types of emulsions, will be attractive both to microfluidic laboratories and to those without microfluidic expertise who need an enabling tool for multicompartmental double emulsion formation. Adapted by permission of The Royal Society of Chemistry [1].
This research was funded through the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada the Canada Foundation for Innovation.
nanoGe is a prestigious brand of successful science conferences that are developed along the year in different areas of the world since 2009. Our worldwide conferences cover cutting-edge materials topics like perovskite solar cells, photovoltaics, optoelectronics, solar fuel conversion, surface science, catalysis and two-dimensional materials, among many others.
Previously nanoGe Spring Meeting (NSM) and nanoGe Fall Meeting (NFM), MATSUS is a multiple symposia conference focused on a broad set of topics of advanced materials preparation, their fundamental properties, and their applications, in fields such as renewable energy, photovoltaics, lighting, semiconductor quantum dots, 2-D materials synthesis, charge carriers dynamics, microscopy and spectroscopy semiconductors fundamentals, etc.
International Conference on Hybrid and Organic Photovoltaics
International Conference on Hybrid and Organic Photovoltaics (HOPV) is celebrated yearly in May. The main topics are the development, function and modeling of materials and devices for hybrid and organic solar cells. The field is now dominated by perovskite solar cells but also other hybrid technologies, as organic solar cells, quantum dot solar cells, and dye-sensitized solar cells and their integration into devices for photoelectrochemical solar fuel production.
Asia-Pacific International Conference on Perovskite, Organic Photovoltaics and Optoelectronics
The main topics of the Asia-Pacific International Conference on Perovskite, Organic Photovoltaics and Optoelectronics (IPEROP) are discussed every year in Asia-Pacific for gathering the recent advances in the fields of material preparation, modeling and fabrication of perovskite and hybrid and organic materials. Photovoltaic devices are analyzed from fundamental physics and materials properties to a broad set of applications. The conference also covers the developments of perovskite optoelectronics, including light-emitting diodes, lasers, optical devices, nanophotonics, nonlinear optical properties, colloidal nanostructures, photophysics and light-matter coupling.
The International Conference on Perovskite Thin Film Photovoltaics Perovskite Photonics and Optoelectronics (NIPHO) is the best place to hear the latest developments in perovskite solar cells as well as on recent advances in the fields of perovskite light-emitting diodes, lasers, optical devices, nanophotonics, nonlinear optical properties, colloidal nanostructures, photophysics and light-matter coupling.