A microfluidic chip using phenol formaldehyde resin for uniform-sized polycaprolactone and chitosan microparticles generation.

Overview

Yung-Sheng Lin, Chih-Hui Yang, Chin-Tung Wu, Alexandru Mihai Grumezescu, Chih-Yu Wang, Szu-Yu Chen, Keng-Shiang Huang, A microfluidic chip using phenol formaldehyde resin for uniform-sized polycaprolactone and chitosan microparticles generation, Molecules, 18:6521-6531, 2013.

ABSTRACT

This study develops a new solvent-compatible microfluidic chip based on phenol formaldehyde resin (PFR). In addition to its solvent-resistant characteristics, this microfluidic platform also features easy fabrication, organization, decomposition for cleaning, and reusability compared with conventional chips. Both solvent-dependent (e.g., polycaprolactone) and nonsolvent-dependent (e.g., chitosan) microparticles were successfully prepared. The size of emulsion droplets could be easily adjusted by tuning the flow rates of the dispersed/continuous phases. After evaporation, polycaprolactone microparticles ranging from 29.3 to 62.7 μm and chitosan microparticles ranging from 215.5 to 566.3 μm were obtained with a 10% relative standard deviation in size. The proposed PFR microfluidic platform has the advantages of active control of the particle size with a narrow size distribution as well as a simple and low cost process with a high throughput.

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