Strategic placement of an obstacle suppresses droplet break up in the hopper flow of a microfluidic soft crystal.

ABSTRACT: When granular materials, colloidal suspensions, and even animals and crowds exit through a narrow outlet, clogs can form spontaneously when multiple particles or entities attempt to exit simultaneously, thereby obstructing the outlet and ultimately halting the flow. Counterintuitively, the presence of an obstacle upstream of the outlet has been found to suppress clog formation. For soft particles such as emulsion drops, clogging has not been observed in the fast flow limit due to their deformability and vanishing interparticle friction. Instead, they pinch off each other and undergo break up when multiple drops attempt to exit simultaneously. Similar to how an obstacle reduces clogging in a rigid particle system, we hypothesize and demonstrate that an obstacle could suppress break up in th

SUBMITTER: Bick AD 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8126775 | biostudies-literature | 2021 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature