Drop formation in liquid-liquid systems has received considerable attention over the last century owing to its many industrial applications. More recent applications may be found in the field of endovascular/percutaneous treatments. The present study focuses on portal vein embolization (PVE), which consists in the blockage of part of the portal trunk though the injection of surgical glue. The short-time injection is dominated by fluid dynamic effects: the influence of polymerization is secondary owing to the presence of ethiodized oil in the injected mixture. If the mechanism of liquid injection is well understood for injections in unconfined fluids at rest, fewer studies have so far considered the case of outer liquids flowing in confined environments. The objective is therefore to conduct a large range parametric study of liquid injections in confined co-flows. An experimental setup has been designed to simulate in vitro the injection in an immiscible liquid flowing in a cylindrical tube. The transition from the dripping to the jetting regimes is found to be independent of confinement, but to depend on the ratio of the inertial forces of the injected liquid to the surface tension, i.e., the Weber number of the inner flow Wei. The confinement, however, has an influence on the drop size in the dripping regime. Its influence diminishes in the first phase of the jetting regime, as the drop size largely decreases. In the fully established jetting regime, the drop size is finally only a function of the ejection tube diameter. To predict the size of the drops in the dripping regime, we have developed a semiempirical model that takes into account the effects of both the tube confinement and outer flow. It will help the interventional radiologists predict the drop size depending on the geometrical and velocimetric conditions at the site of embolization. All these results can then serve as a base to optimize the PVE technique during clinical practice.
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