Droplet Microfluidics for Fabrication of Non-Spherical Particles

We describe new developments for controlled fabrication of monodisperse non-spherical particles using droplet microfluidics. The high degree of control afforded by microfluidic technologies enables generation of single and multiple emulsion droplets. We show that these droplets can be transformed to non-spherical particles through further simple, spontaneous processing steps, including arrested coalescence, asymmetric polymer solidification, polymerization in microfluidic flow, and evaporation-driven clustering. These versatile and scalable microfluidic approaches can be used for producing large quantities of non-spherical particles that are monodisperse in both size and shape; these have great potential for commercial applications. © 2010 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA.