Drag-induced breakup mechanism for droplet generation in dripping within flow focusing microfluidics

Based on viscous drag-induced breakup mechanism, a simple model was proposed to predict the dripping droplet size as a function of controllable parameters in flow focusing micro devices. The size of thread before breakup was also investigated through laminar flow theory. Experiments and numerical simulations by VOF are carried out simultaneously to validate the theoretical analysis, showing that droplet size decreases rapidly with the increase of the flow rate ratio and capillary number.