Fabrication of two-dimensional ferrofluid microdroplet lattices in a microfluidic channel

In this paper, we investigated the influences of magnetic field on the ferrofluid droplet generation and the arrangement of the collected droplets in a T-junction microfluidic. Our study includes the field-dependent droplet generation rate, droplet size, as well as the spatial density of the self-assembled droplet collections that were analyzed under the conditions of constant fluid flow rates and capillary number, and all of the field-dependent properties were found inversely proportional to the applied magnetic field strength. In addition, the droplet merging was also able to be avoided by the induced repulsive magnetic force between ferrofluid droplets. (C) 2014 AIP Publishing LLC.