A microfluidic platform for manipulation and separation of oil-in-water emulsion droplets by using optically induced dielectrophoresis (ODEP) is reported in this study. By utilizing different scanning speeds of a moving light beam, the oil-in-water emulsion droplets can be moved and separated with a high separation resolution. A first demonstration of this platform is pre-separation and fine separation of emulsion droplets. Three groups of droplets with different sizes (40–43, 20–30 and 2–8 µm) can be roughly separated first. The fine separation of emulsion droplets with a radius difference of 2.5 µm can be performed using a moving light beam with a gradual gradient of moving speeds. To avoid the collision and overlapping of the droplets, a new approach to assign individual moving track for each droplet was adopted by using well-defined moving light patterns. Accordingly, droplets with five different sizes (30, 20, 10, 7.5 and 5 µm) can be successfully separated. The second demonstration is to separate satellite and master emulsion droplets generated from microfluidic emulsion chips. The developed platform has a great potential to control the quality of emulsion droplets.
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Hung et al. (2010) studied this question.
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