Interface Evolution in a Microchannel, an Experimental and Numerical Study

The paper is concerned with studying oil in water emulsions in a microchannel with three branches. The main goals of the study are to determine the evolution of the interface between mineral oil and deionized water as a function of the inflow conditions and the velocity profile across the main microchannel using μPIV. Further numerical simulations were performed and validated using the inflow conditions from the experiment. In turn, from the numerical simulations, important quantities such as helicity and vorticity magnitude were extracted and used to characterize the flow field.