Search arXiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2003.01103

A 4-channel microfluidic hydrodynamic trap for droplet deformation and coalescence in extensional flows

Shweta Narayan·Davis B. Moravec·Andrew J. Dallas·Cari S. Dutcher
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Here, we trap and control the position of droplets to study their dynamics using hydrodynamic forces alone without an external field. The hydrodynamic trap is adapted from a previously implemented Stokes trap by incorporating a drop-on-demand system to generate droplets at a T-junction geometry on the same microfluidic chip. We then study confined droplet dynamics in response to perturbation by applying a millisecond-pressure pulse to deform trapped droplets. Droplet shape relaxation after cessation of the pressure pulse follows an exponential decay. The characteristic droplet shape relaxation time is obtained from the shape decay curves for aqueous glycerol droplets of varying viscosities in the dispersed phase with light and heavy mineral oils in the continuous phase. Systems were chosen to provide similar equilibrium interfacial tensions (5-10 mN/m) with wide variations of viscosity ratios. It is found that the droplet shape relaxation shows a strong dependence on droplet radius, and a weak dependence on the ratio of dispersed to continuous phase viscosity. The relaxation time is smaller for the highest viscosity ratios, potentially indicating that the dominant viscosity controls the droplet shape relaxation time in addition to the interfacial tension and droplet size. Droplet shape relaxation time can be used inform the response of droplets in an emulsion when subjected to transient flows in various processing conditions. Finally, an application of this platform for directly visualizing individual droplet coalescence in a planar extensional flow is presented. The microfluidic four-channel hydrodynamic trap can thus be applied for studying fundamental physics of droplet deformation and droplet-droplet interactions on the micro-scale to provide an enhanced understanding of emulsion behavior on an individual droplet level.

Explore related subjects

physics.flu-dyn

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Shweta Narayan, Davis B. Moravec, Andrew J. Dallas, Cari S. Dutcher. 2020-03-02. A 4-channel microfluidic hydrodynamic trap for droplet deformation and coalescence in extensional flows. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevfluids.5.113603

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Kinetic closure of turbulence

This letter presents a kinetic closure of the filtered Boltzmann--BGK equation, paving the way toward an alternative description of turbulence. The closure retains the turbulent subfilter stress tensor without a separate Smagorinsky-type ansatz for its structure, unlike classical filtered Navier--Stokes closures. In contrast, it accounts for the subfilter turbulent diffusion in the nonconserved moments by generalizing the BGK collision operator. The model does not require scale separation between resolved and unresolved scales. The Chapman--Enskog analysis shows how its hydrodynamic limit can converge to the filtered Navier--Stokes equations, with velocity gradients isolating subfilter contributions. Numerical tests on the Taylor--Green vortex and the turbulent mixing layer show improved stability and reduced dissipation in the reported cases, benchmarked against the Smagorinsky model.

physics.flu-dyn↗
arXiv2026

Kinetic closure of turbulence: collision-side modeling beyond the filtered Boltzmann equation

This article extends a recently introduced kinetic closure of turbulence by developing its theoretical framework, operational realizations, and validation. In contrast with filtered Navier--Stokes formulations, filtering the Boltzmann equation retains subgrid transport under the linear streaming operator, so that unresolved physics is concentrated on the collision side. We show that in dilute-gas large-eddy simulation, the main limitation of Bhatnagar--Gross--Krook (BGK)-type collision models is not the breakdown of molecular chaos, but the retention of a Markovian collision at a scale where filtering can induce finite temporal correlations in the collision product. In a BGK-type framework, the closure problem is dual: one must infer the filtered fine-grained equilibrium, not computable from filtered moments alone, and model the non-Markovian collision dynamics generated by the collision-product covariance. The present framework makes this dual structure explicit and represents the resulting collision-covariance source term through a BGK-like closure built from the equilibrium commutation residual, with the turbulent relaxation frequency given by a first phenomenological realization. The framework relies on a Chapman--Enskog analysis organized by the reference timescale ratio emerging from the nondimensionalization of the kinetic equation, performed in the classical sense, thereby avoiding artificial turbulent scale separations. We show that the Chapman--Enskog structure is not a pure one-parameter Knudsen scaling: the primary ordering is set by the kinetic-to-macroscopic timescale ratio, while higher moments retain an additional Mach dependence through the mixed scaling of particle velocity. The resulting kinetic closures are validated through lattice Boltzmann simulations and compared with the Smagorinsky model and regularization-based collision models.

physics.flu-dyn↗
arXiv2026

Deep Koopman Sensing

Real-time reconstruction of fluid flows from sparse sensor measurements is important for both physical understanding and flow control. When first-principles models are too expensive for online data assimilation (DA), learned reduced-order models provide an efficient alternative, but are commonly optimized for forward prediction rather than state estimation. We propose Deep Koopman Sensing, a data-driven reduced-order DA framework that combines a nonlinear autoencoder with parameter-conditioned linear latent dynamics approximating the Koopman operator. We compare the proposed model with parametric dynamic mode decomposition (pDMD), a multilayer perceptron (MLP), and xLSTM across four benchmarks: 1D viscous Burgers, 2D flow past a cylinder, 2D dambreak, and 3D flow past a sphere. Our results reveal a marked distinction between forecasting and sensing: open-loop accuracy does not reliably predict assimilation performance, while Deep Koopman Sensing achieves the lowest assimilation error across all four benchmarks. More importantly, with an extended Kalman filter, incorporating sensor measurements improves the estimates of both linear latent models across all four benchmarks, whereas it degrades the nonlinear models, despite their strong open-loop performance. With ensemble filtering, the nonlinear models are no longer degraded by assimilation, while the Koopman model still attains the lowest assimilation error. These results show that latent dynamics should be designed for the downstream estimation task rather than selected solely for forecast accuracy, and demonstrate Koopman-based reduced-order modeling as an effective approach for real-time flow reconstruction from sparse, streaming measurements.

physics.flu-dyn↗