A novel actuation technique for the on-demand injection of charge-free conducting droplets in a viscous dielectric liquid

作者：Raisin Jonathan; Atten Pierre; Reboud Jean Luc^*

来源：Experiments in Fluids, 2013, 54(3): 1473.

DOI：10.1007/s00348-013-1473-y

The paper presents recent improvements and results on the on-demand injection of small electrically neutral water drops in oil by high electric field pulses. The technique consists in applying a voltage pulse promoting the deformation of a water meniscus at the end of a capillary tube through the action of electric forces. For pulses of calibrated energy, the transient deformation can lead to the inertia-based ejection of a small uncharged droplet. Application of in-house developed multi-stage electric pulses offers, in contrast to usual single pulses, wider ranges of droplet size, improved reproducibility and stable ejection trajectories. Influence of the main parameters on the extracted droplet diameter is presented: it is shown that, by using capillary tubes of outer tip diameter close to 0.5 mm, it is possible to obtain, in a reproducible way, drops of diameter ranging from less than 15 mu m up to more than 250 mu m.

• 出版日期2013-3