High yielding microbubble production method

Abstract

Microfluidic approaches to microbubble production are generally disadvantaged by low yield and high susceptibility to (micro)channel blockages. This paper presents an alternative method of producing microbubbles of 2.6 m mean diameter at concentrations in excess of 30 × 106 mL-1. In this method, the nitrogen gas flowing inside the liquid jet is disintegrated into spray of microbubble when air surrounding this coflowing nitrogen gas-liquid jet passes through a 100 m orifice at high velocity. Resulting microbubble foam has the polydispersity index of 16%. Moreover, a ratio of mean microbubble diameter to channel width ratio was found to be less than 0.025, which substantially alleviates the occurrence of blockages during production.