Magnetofluidic control of the breakup of ferrofluid droplets in a microfluidic Y-junction

Abstract

This paper is mainly focused on the investigation of the magnetofluidic control of the breakup of ferrofluid droplets in a symmetric Y-junction. The asymmetric breakup of the ferrofluid droplet or non-breakup with filtering the mother droplet into a desired branch to separate it from the satellite droplet was implemented by an external magnetic field. The breakup processes of ferrofluid droplets with and without the magnetic field were studied systematically. The influences of both the flow rate ratio between the continuous phase and dispersed phase and the magnetic flux density on the sizes of daughter droplets were determined. It was found that the attractive magnetic force shifted the mass center of mother droplet in the upstream main channel, which accordingly facilitated the asymmetric breakup of the droplet at the downstream Y-junction. A power function correlation for precisely predicting the sizes of daughter droplets was proposed by introducing the magnetic Bond number (Bo_m). Moreover, we also found that the controllable magnetic force could promote the pattern transition between the breakup and non-breakup of ferrofluid droplets.