Drop through liquid film a preliminary study..pdfVIP

L Master’s Degree Project in Electrical Measurement Technology no.394 Stockholm, Sweden 2004 LAURENT GEY Drop through liquid film: a preliminary study Master thesis by Laurent Geyl Drop through liquid film: a preliminary study. Supervisor: Assoc Prof. Wouter van der Wijngaart Examiner: Assist Prof. Hans S?hlstrom Royal Institute of Technology Department of Signals, Sensors and Systems Microsystem Technology Lab Stockholm, April 2005 Laurent Geyl Drop through liquid film: a preliminary study KTH-S3-Microsystems Abstract Microsystem Technology allows new principles and devices for the dispensing of accurate amount of liquid. Yet they present some disadvantages such as the cost of fabrication and the amount of liquid required to make the device work. A novel concept for drop dispensing is presented here. It consists in generating a drop by shooting another one, coming from a printhead, through a free hanging liquid film. In that way biological liquids, which can not be handled by a few drop-on-demand devices due to their conductivity, could be dispensed. Drops are successfully impacting a 75 μm thick liquid film and leading to a secondary drop for speeds above 7 m·s-1. The secondary drop is not affected by satellites although they are present in the tail of the primary one. The secondary drop contains 4% in mass the liquid that comes from the film. This result, together with the analysis of the volume of the generated drop, reveals that the drop is more or less passing through the film. There is rather a small transport of liquid from the film than a transfer of liquid. The effects of parameters such as the liquid properties, the liquid film thickness, the speed and volume of the incoming drop on the exchange of liquid during the impact are discussed and open the way to further studies