Radio Frequency Resonator for Continuous Monitoring of Microfluidic Droplet Size Dispersity

D. Conchouso [1], G. Mckerricher [1], D. Castro [1], A. Arevalo [1], I. G. Foulds [2]
[1] King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Thuwal, Makkah, Saudi Arabia
[2] School of Engineering, University of British Columbia - Okanagan, Vancouver, BC, Canada
Published in 2015

Parallelization of droplet microfluidics is a challenging task because of the complex fluid mechanics coupling between parallel devices. Failure of few droplet generators can influence the size distribution of the final product and the correct operation of the neighbor devices. One of the typical causes of failure is channel clogging, in which one of the phases cannot flow through the generation stage. In this work, we propose to use a Radio Frequency (RF) T-resonator to monitor continuously the oil and water composition of the mix that is flowing through the channels. This approach can also be parallelizable by designing T-resonators with different resonant frequencies.