Micrometer glass nozzles for flow focusing

We discuss the use of flame-shaped glass micro-nozzles for ultra-fine liquid atomization by flow focusing (DePonte et al 2008 J. Phys. D: Appl. Phys. 41 195505), which may have great importance in very varied technological fields, such as biotechnology, biomedicine and analytical chemistry. Some advantages offered by these nozzles over the original plate orifice configuration (Ganan-Calvo 1998 Phys. Rev. Lett. 80 285) are: (i) they are extraordinarily smooth even at the micrometer scale, (ii) one can readily obtain nozzles with neck diameters in the range of a few tens of microns, (iii) they demand gas flow rates significantly smaller than those required by the plate orifice configuration and (iv) they are transparent. However, highly demanding applications require a precise characterization of their three-dimensional shape by non-destructive means. This characterization cannot be obtained straightforwardly from optical transmission or electron microscopy mainly due to optical distortion. We propose in this paper a method for measuring the shape and size of micrometer nozzles formed inside millimetric and submillimetric capillaries made of transparent materials. The inside of the capillary is colored, and the capillary is put in a liquid bath with almost the same refractive index as that of the capillary to eliminate optical distortion. The nozzle image, acquired with a microscope using back-light illumination to get a silhouette effect, is processed to locate the contours of the nozzle with sub-pixel resolution. To determine the three-dimensional shape of the nozzle, the capillary is rotated in front of the camera. The method provides precise results for nozzle sizes down to a few microns.