INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PRECISION ENGINEERING AND MANUFACTURING Vol. 11, No. 5, pp.

799-802 OCTOBER 2010 / 799

DOI: 10.1007/s12541-010-0095-z

Generation of Janus Droplets for Enhanced

Mixing in Microfluidics
Sanghoon Ahn1,*, Dong Wook Kim1, Young Won Kim2 and Jung Yul Yoo1,3,#
1 School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Seoul National University, 599 Gwanangno, Gwanack-gu, Seoul, Korea, 151-744
2 BK21 School for Creative Engineering Design of Next Generation Mechanical and Aerospace Systems, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea, 151-744
3 Institute of Advanced Machinery and Design, Seoul National University, 599 Gwanangno, Gwanack-gu, Seoul, Korea, 151-744
*Present address: University of California - Berkeley, Mechanical Engineering Department, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA
# Corresponding Author / E-mail: jyyoo@snu.ac.kr, TEL: +82-2-880-7112, FAX: +82-2-883-0179

KEYWORDS: Droplet generation, Enhanced mixing, Janus droplet, Janus particle, Micro bubble

A microfluidic channel system to generate Janus droplets is designed and fabricated, where the term Janus droplet
refers to a chemically biphasic droplet. It is demonstrated that Janus droplets are formed from elongational
breakup of coflowing core fluids which are constrained by a sheath fluid on both sides of them. Rhodamine B is
adopted as an indicator to indentify generated Janus droplets. Monodisperse Janus droplets have been generated
in a controllable manner such that those with average diameters of 26 ± 1.24 µm, 31 ± 1.44 µm and 34 ± 2.28 µm
are formed in accordance with flow rate ratios between the sheath fluid and the core fluids, 30.7, 36.4 and 44.4,
respectively. Generation of Janus droplets, demonstrated in the present study, has seen a new application in the
areas of biotechnology and bioengineering, where enhanced mixing inside the micro bubbles can be utilized
without the aid of other means of droplet generation and merging.

Manuscript received: March 19, 2010 / Accepted: June 3, 2010

1. Introduction
The term microfluidics refers to a set of technologies that
control fluids transported through microchannels with a length scale
of less than a millimeter. For the past few decades, microfluidics
has attracted considerable attention because of its wide range of
scientific and engineering applications toward lab-on-a-chip (LOC)
devices.1,2 The use of integrated microfluidic devices or LOC
systems offers numerous advantages, such as small sample volume,
ease of use, point-of-care diagnostics, fast reaction of the sample,
and so forth, for engineers and scientists in the fields of bio-
engineering, medicine, biology and chemistry.3,4
Microfluidic devices are capable of various functions, such as
mixing, merging, splitting, focusing and, in particular, using an
extremely small sample volume.5 These functions can be realized in
a more programmable manner by droplet-based transport of the
sample fluid. Thus, generation and manipulation of droplets
(bubbles) in microfluidic platform have been of great importance
for potential applications, such as drug development, plastic
polymerization, chemical processing, etc.6 Normally, micro droplets
are generated singly in T- or cross-junction microchannels.7-11 These
droplets or bi-slugs are chemically homogeneous, which (i.e.,
reactants) are then merged with other target materials (i.e., reagents)
to achieve a microfluidic function. In other words, additional
microfluidic components are required for achieving this merging
process. Further, in order to satisfy the requirements of both small
sample volume and rapid reaction time in the merging process, the
size of the generated droplets should be absolutely as small as
possible.8,9 However, it is practically limited due to the difficulty in
achieving high flow-rate ratio of two immiscible liquids.
One possible solution to meet the requirement of small sample
volume is to generate a two-component (or multi-component)
droplet or a biphasic droplet. More specifically, droplets can be
generated in such a manner that one half of the droplet volume is to
be reagent while the other half is to be reactant, so that they can be
referred to as ‘Janus’ droplets.10 The droplet generated with this
strategy has an advantage that no additional microfluidic
components for droplet generation and merging are required, unlike
in the conventional microfluidic systems, because molecules can be
diffused across the interface inside a Janus droplet. This diffusion
eventually contributes to the mixing within the droplet itself. In this
paper, we propose a methodology to generate Janus droplets in
microfluidic systems. Design of the microchannel system in terms
of the capillary number is discussed, and visualization of the

© KSPE and Springer 2010

 800 / OCTOBER 2010 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PRECISION ENGINEERING AND MANUFACTURING Vol. 11, No. 5

generated Janus droplets is presented. and then cured in an oven at 65℃ for 1 hr. A microphotograph of
the microchannel system thus fabricated is shown in Fig. 1(b).

2. Channel design and generation of Janus droplets

Elongational-flow type of microfluidic channels has been

adopted to generate Janus droplets in the present study. There are
two major force components that contribute to droplet generation in
the elongational flow, i.e., shear force and interfacial force.11-13
Droplet generation can be achieved by balancing one force
component with the other. Capillary number (Ca) gives a measure
of the ratio of shear force to interfacial tension acting across an
interface between two immiscible liquids. The shear force is
associated with fluid viscosities (µ) and flow rate (Q) of the carrier
Fig. 2 A schematic illustrating the droplet generation process in
fluid. Hence, the microchannel system has been designed by
view of feeding of the liquids
considering these three parameters, i.e., capillary number, viscosity
and flow rate.
Next, a schematic illustrating the droplet generation process in
The capillary number representing microfluidic droplet
view of feeding of the liquids through respective branches of the
formation in terms of the continuous phase flow field that acts to
microchannel system is shown in Fig. 2. A mixture of PEG-DA
deform the droplet is given as follows:7
(MW 575, Sigma-Aldrich, USA) and rhodamine B (Sigma-Aldrich,
µ BWAQB  1 1  USA) with a volume ratio of 0.85 : 0.15 is introduced as ‘Liquid
Ca =  − , (1)
2σ h∆z Wo 2WB  A1’, while a mixture of PEG-DA and L-aspartic acid with a volume
ratio of 0.7 : 0.3 is fed as ‘Liquid A2’. Viscosities of the mixtures
are measured to be µA1 = µA2 ≈ 57 cP. Rhodamine B is provided as
an indicator to identify a Janus droplet, while L-aspartic acid is
added as a chemical attractant to be used in our future study on
bacterial chemotaxis using solidified Janus particles. On the other
hand, silicon oil (Shin-Etsu Chemical, Japan) is introduced as the
sheath fluid (Liquid B in Fig. 2) with a viscosity of µB = 70 cP. The
flow rate ratio of the sheath fluid to that of the core fluids (Liquids
A1 and A2) is defined as ∅ = 2QB /(QA1 + QA 2 ) which is
maintained to be φ > 30 throughout the experiment, with QB = 200
µL/hr. Thus, Ca << 1, which is within the range of typical
microfluidic experiments.

(a)

Fig. 1 (a) Conceptual schematic of the present microchannel system,

and (b) a microphotograph of the microchannel system fabricated (b)
through a soft-lithography process

where σ is the interfacial tension between the two liquids.

Parameters regarding the configuration of the present microchannel
system are illustrated in Fig. 1(a). In the present study, we adopt
channel dimensions of h = 55 µm, WA = WB = 100 µm, WO = 20 µm
and ∆Z = 80 µm, where the microchannel system is fabricated via a
soft-lithography process. Briefly, PDMS (Dow Corning, USA) and
a curing agent (Dow Corning, USA) are mixed with a volume ratio
of 10 : 1, and stirred vigorously. The mixture is degassed in the
room temperature for 15 min, cast onto the SU8-patterned master,
(c)
Fig. 3 Generation of Janus droplets at three different flow rate
conditions of coflowing core fluids: (a) QA1 = 3 µL/hr, QA2 = 6
µL/hr; (b) QA1 = 4 µL/hr, QA2 = 7 µL/hr; (c) QA1 = 3 µL/hr, QA2 = 10
µL/hr, for a fixed QB = 200 µL/hr
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PRECISION ENGINEERING AND MANUFACTURING Vol. 11, No. 5
Fig. 3 is a microphotograph of Janus droplets successfully
generated, such that the upper hemisphere of each droplet looks
bright due to the emission of rhodamine B molecules, and the lower
hemisphere looks dark. Once the Janus droplets are thus generated,
mixing due to the diffusion occurs across the interface in the middle
of the droplet. This means that no additional components for droplet
generation and merging are required of the microchannel system for
enhanced mixing. To estimate the mixing time inside the Janus
droplet, diffusion length is calculated as L = Dt ≈ 15 µm, where
D is the diffusion coefficient. Overall, the diffusion time t required
for the molecules of the rhodamine B at the interface is estimated to
be 2 s, which is acceptable for practical microfluidic applications.
Thus, Janus droplets are generated in microchannels with the
average diameter of 26 ~ 34 µm depending on the flow rate ratio.
Specifically, the average droplet diameters are measured to be 26 ±
1.24 µm, 31 ± 1.44 µm and 34 ± 2.28 µm as φ is increased
successively to 30.7, 36.4 and 44.4. The numbers of droplets used
for data analysis are 93, 46 and 50 for respective particle sizes.
Generation of droplets in an elongational flow in microchannels
mainly depends on the viscosity ratio between the sheath fluid
(Liquid B) and the core fluids (Liquids A1 and A2), and φ.
Although it is recommended that the viscosity ratio is maintained to
be larger than 20,11,12 we successfully produced Janus particles with
a dramatically smaller viscosity ratio of 1.22 in the present study.
As for the critical value of φ necessary for the formation of Janus
droplets, they have been successfully formed for φ > 30. Further,
although we also tried to generate smaller droplets (e.g., ~ 20 µm),
instability in the formation of the droplet was observed, which
results in poor uniformity of the droplet size. It is also observed that
the droplets detached from the elongational flow have not been
aligned along the centerline of the channel due to the imbalance of
shear stresses between the sheath fluid and the two core fluids.
Instability of the droplet generation caused by this imbalance
should be more extensively investigated in terms of the viscosity
ratio between the sheath fluid and the core fluids, or by imposing
different flow rates on the two branches for the sheath fluid in
future work. Lastly, although we controlled droplet size with the
limited cases of the flow rates of the core fluids, more systematic
study is also required to evaluate the effect of the flow rate on the
droplet size.
3. Summary and applications
In the present study, we have demonstrated the generation of
Janus droplets in microfluidics. A microchannel using an
elongational flow by considering the capillary number is designed
and fabricated via a soft-lithography process. Janus droplets with
sizes in the range of 26 ~ 31 µm are generated in a controllable
manner in terms of the flow rate of the core fluids. Optimization of
the droplet generation is required for a broad range of capillary
numbers in the next study. The present study proposes a novel
methodology that no additional components for droplet generation
and merging are required of the microchannel system when the
OCTOBER 2010 / 801
Janus droplets are generated for the purpose of enhanced mixing.
Further, this work is also important as a preliminary study for the
generation of Janus particles via solidification of the Janus droplet,
which is of wide application in the areas of biotechnology and
bioengineering.10,14 More specifically, Behkam and Sitti15
demonstrated a plasma-based bacteria patterning technique to limit
bacteria attachment on a half of the microbead surface, so that they
improved the moving speed of the bead propelled by bacteria
flagella. On the other hand, Nisisako et al.16 created switchable
display panel by using an electrical anisotropy of Janus particles
filled with white and black pigments in both hemispheres, which
provided a possibility of very thin, robust, and environmentally
stable displays. Janus particles can be also adopted as efficient
optical probes for biological interactions and rheological
measurements in confined space, which is brought forward by
Behrend and coworkers.17 Further, Janus particles have seen many
applications from the nanoscience and industrial point of view,
which have been reviewed in the literature.14
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
This work was supported by the Korea Research Foundation
Grant funded by the Korean Government (MOEHRD) (KRF-0420-
20070058).
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