CFD Analysis of Generation of Soybean Oil-in-Water Emulsion Droplets Using Rectangular Straight-Through Microchannels

Abstract

This study reports a three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis of generation of soybean oil-in-water emulsion droplets using rectangular straight-through microchannels (MCs) with shorter lines of 5 to 15μm and aspect ratios of 2 to 5. The results indicated that rectangular channels exceeding a threshold aspect ratio between 3 and 3.25 were capable of generating small droplets with a diameter (d) between 18 and 53μm in the absence of the continuous-phase flow. The d value was greatly affected by the channel size and slightly affected by the channel aspect ratio. Good agreement was found between the CFD results obtained in this study and experimental results reported in the literature.