High throughput production of uniformly-sized fluorocarbon emulsions for ultrasonic therapy using a silicon-based microfluidic system

Sonosensitive particles such as microbubbles and emulsions are typically produced using methods that generate a wide range of particle sizes. These polydisperse distributions are not ideal and thus research efforts have focused on developing techniques to generate more uniformly-sized particles. This works demonstrates the fabrication of a massively parallel microfluidic device consisting of 2,500 channels, which enables fast production rates compared to single channel microfluidic devices. Fluorocarbon emulsions were generated using this device and sized with a Coulter counter. The mean droplet diameters ranged from 5 to 8 μm with coefficients of variance in the range of 14-40%. Production rates as high as 6.5 MHz were observed. Overall, these results indicate that uniformly-sized emulsions can be generated at rates feasible for scale-up.