High-throughput formation and control of monodisperse liquid crystals droplets driven by an alternating current electric field in a microfluidic device

摘要

We investigate the effect of an applied ac high voltage on a confined stable nematic liquid crystal (LC) in a microfluidic device and show that this actuation leads to the formation of highly monodisperse microdroplets with an unexpected constant mean size over a large interval of the forcing frequency F and with a droplets production frequency f ≌2F. We show also that despite the nonlinear feature of the droplets formation mechanism, droplets size, and size distribution are governed simply by the LC flow rate Q_d and the forcing frequency F.