Jeyasountharan Anoshanth, Del Giudice Francesco
Department of Chemical Engineering, School of Engineering and Applied Science, Faculty of Science and Engineering, Swansea University, Swansea SA1 8EN, UK.
Micromachines (Basel). 2023 Feb 27;14(3):563. doi: 10.3390/mi14030563.
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.
在生物医学工程以及材料科学领域，将颗粒和细胞包裹在液滴中具有高度相关性。然而，到目前为止，该领域的大多数研究都集中在包裹悬浮于牛顿流体中的颗粒或细胞。我们在此研究了T型微流控装置中的颗粒包裹现象，使用磷酸盐缓冲盐水中的非牛顿粘弹性透明质酸溶液作为颗粒的悬浮液。我们首先研究了非牛顿液滴形成机制，发现归一化液滴长度的数据与牛顿流体的情况具有相同的比例关系。然后我们进行了粘弹性包裹实验，利用颗粒在接近包裹区域之前自组装成等间距结构这一事实，进而确定了一些单包裹效率大于泊松统计预测的随机极限的实验条件。
