Preparação de emulsões complexas a partir de dispositivos de microfluídica

• Autor(a) principal: Arcanjo, Samuel Arruda
• Data de Publicação: 2009
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: LOCUS Repositório Institucional da UFV
• Texto Completo: http://locus.ufv.br/handle/123456789/4238
• topic: Microfluídica; Emulsões; Dispersões coloidais; Microfluidics; Emulsions; Colloidal dispersions; CNPQ::CIENCIAS EXATAS E DA TERRA::FISICA::FISICA DA MATERIA CONDENSADA

Emulsions are colloidal systems where one liquid is dispersed in another liquid where the two liquids are immiscible. The control of these dispersions can bring important contributions to science and society since this kind of colloidal system has many and important applications in the food and pharmaceutic area and also in the material science. This work has the main purpose to develop and improve monodisperse emulsions production techniques using simple and low-cost devices. It is shown the production of simple emulsions using devices built from glass capillary tubes. Besides, the drops diameter dependence with the phases flow rate is verified. Solid particles were made from droplets of poly(styrene) dispersed in chloroform, followed by the evaporation of the chloroform, using these devices. Although the glass capillary tube devices show good results, we have made emulsions, for instance, of (80±1) μm with standard deviation of 1,3 μm (σ/dm = 1, 6%), they have limitations concerning the configuration of the tubes. Another kind of device built was made basically from microchannels produced in glass microscope slides using hydrofluoric acid to attack the slide surfaces. The slides were sealed using epoxy glue and the final result were channels with controlled values of depth and width. The dependence of the drops diameter with the continuous and disperse phases flow rate were made to test the devices quality. High quality emulsions were obtained with tipical values for diameter and standar deviation about 100 μm and 2%. Four different channel configurations were tested and the configuration where the channels were built as a cross (one channel carrying the disperse phase and two channels carrying the continuous phase) shown better results then the devices with only two channels (one channel carrying each phase).