Digital twin for controlled generation of water-in-oil microdroplets with required size

In this paper, we report a digital twin of a droplet microfluidic system with closed-loop droplet size control. Compared to the state-of-the-art, this digital twin allows evaluating the system for a wider range of droplet sizes. We constructed a digital twin of a microfluidic Flow-Focusing Device (FFD) that used a Proportional Integral (PI) controller to automatically adjust the flow rate of the dispersed phase, to obtain the required droplet size. The efficacy of the digital twin was evaluated using six droplet diameters ranging from 30-60 m. The simulation results show good agreement between the tested and measured droplet sizes (R
²
= 0.993).