Viscosity based droplet size controlling in negative pressure driven droplets generator for large-scale particle synthesis.

The poor control and regulation of droplets limit the applications of negative pressure driven droplet generator (NPDDG). Here, we present a simple method to control droplet size in NPDDG via varying the oil viscosity. Depending on the infinite intersolubility of high viscous mineral oil and low viscous hexadecane, we obtain a series of oils with kinematic viscosities linearly varied from 4.2 to 194.6 mm2 /s. By using these oils as continuous phases, monodisperse droplets are fabricated with controllable size in NPDDG. This viscosity-based droplet regulation method is effective, reliable, and compatible with scale-up processes. Compared with droplet generator driven by positive pressure, the presented method can fabricate hydrogel particles massively, without complicated multilayer chip structure and complex fluid controlling, which may extend the potential of NPDDG in droplets based high-throughput assay or large-scale materials synthesis.