| In this thesis, we present a versatile new method for preparing highly monodisperse droplets, polymer particles, double emulsions, and self-assemblies of droplets in continuous microfluidic reactors. Recently, microfluidic systems are significantly being used in many areas of chemistry and biotechnology to achieve improved performance. Microfluidics provides the ability to automate highly repetitive laboratory tasks by replacing huge cumbersome equipment with miniaturized and integrated systems, and it enables the handling of small amounts, e.g., from microliters to femtoliters of fluids, reactants and products. These methods have the following useful features: (1) the generation of extremely monodisperse droplets, (2) the generation and control of both the shape and the size of the droplets, (3) the use of a wide variety of materials, including: gels, monomers, polymers, copolymers, and polymers doped with functional additives, (4) a possibility of in situ solidification of the droplets by means of photopolymerization and/or thermopolymerization, and (5) the ability to scale up the production of large quantities of particles. We focus on the effect of the properties of the disperse and continuous phases on the emulsification process, the effect of the polymerization rate on the production of high-quality particles, the role of the material and geometry of the microfluidic device in droplet formation, and the synthesis of particles with different shapes and compositions.;This thesis also describes emulsification in a microfluidic double droplet generator (DDR) comprising two consecutive flow-focusing devices with locally modified surface chemistry. We generated water-in-oil- in-water (W/O/W), oil-in-oil-in water (O/O/W) and oil-in-water-in-oil (O/W/O) double emulsions with precisely controlled sizes and morphology of droplets. Secondly, by combining two mechanisms of droplet formation (the flow-focusing mechanism and the break up of liquid threads at T-junction) we produced multiple populations of droplets with varying size and/or composition. These droplets were used as the structural units for the formation of complex dynamic lattices. |
