Investigation of a microfluidic approach to study very high nucleation rates involved in precipitation processes

Abstract

A microfluidic device has been specially developed to enable the study of fast nucleation kinetics involved in precipitation processes. This setup allows drops of two different reagents to be generated synchronously and to coalesce, and ensure the mixing of their reactants within few milliseconds. The results presented in this paper show that droplet based microfluidic devices are promising tools for studying high nucleation rates involved in precipitation processes. By using the stochastic nature of the nucleation process and the effect of the confinement on the induction time, a tailored microfluidic device has been used to measure nucleation rates as high as J=7.68×1013 m−3 s−1. Moreover, kinetic data deriving from nucleation experiments were found in good agreement with data deriving from “conventional” technics.