We introduce an integrated droplet-based platform for generation of uniform water droplets in a gaseous medium. The airborne drops are formed in a flow-focusing microchannel and travel along the generation unit towards its outlet, where they transition into a liquid phase carrier from the initial gaseous phase. Captured droplets are collected within the platform’s collection unit, and subsequently extracted and transferred into the manipulation unit. A flow based microfluidic scheme is utilized for droplet harvesting to obtain an array of closely-spaced digital droplets, which makes them suitable for further processing operations. The five major steps in the presented scheme i.e. 1) generation, 2) transition, 3) collection, 4) extraction, and 5) harvesting of droplets are all performed automatically in a multilayer LOC platform fabricated in PDMS.
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