Stabilization and fabrication of microbubbles: applications for medical purposes and functional materials.

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Abstract

Microbubbles with diameters ranging from a few micrometers to tens of micrometers have garnered significant attention in various applications including food processing, water treatment, enhanced oil recovery, surface cleaning, medical purposes, and material preparation fields with versatile functionalities. A variety of techniques have been developed to prepare microbubbles, such as ultrasonication, excimer laser ablation, high shear emulsification, membrane emulsification, an inkjet printing method, electrohydrodynamic atomization, template layer-by-layer deposition, and microfluidics. Generated bubbles should be immediately stabilized via the adsorption of stabilizing materials (e.g., surfactants, lipids, proteins, and solid particles) onto the gas-liquid interface to lower the interfacial tension. Such adsorption of stabilizers prevents coalescence between the microbubbles and also suppresses gas dissolution and resulting disproportionation caused by the presence of the Laplace overpressure across the gas-liquid interface. Herein, we comprehensively review three important topics of microbubbles: stabilization, fabrication, and applications.

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Most cited references 119

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Formation of droplets and bubbles in a microfluidic T-junction-scaling and mechanism of break-up.

Piotr Garstecki, Michael J Fuerstman, Howard A Stone … (2006)

This article describes the process of formation of droplets and bubbles in microfluidic T-junction geometries. At low capillary numbers break-up is not dominated by shear stresses: experimental results support the assertion that the dominant contribution to the dynamics of break-up arises from the pressure drop across the emerging droplet or bubble. This pressure drop results from the high resistance to flow of the continuous (carrier) fluid in the thin films that separate the droplet from the walls of the microchannel when the droplet fills almost the entire cross-section of the channel. A simple scaling relation, based on this assertion, predicts the size of droplets and bubbles produced in the T-junctions over a range of rates of flow of the two immiscible phases, the viscosity of the continuous phase, the interfacial tension, and the geometrical dimensions of the device.

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Graphene oxide sheets at interfaces.

Jaemyung Kim, Laura Cote, Franklin Kim … (2010)

Graphite oxide sheet, now called graphene oxide (GO), is the product of chemical exfoliation of graphite and has been known for more than a century. GO has been largely viewed as hydrophilic, presumably due to its excellent colloidal stability in water. Here we report that GO is an amphiphile with hydrophilic edges and a more hydrophobic basal plane. GO can act like a surfactant, as measured by its ability to adsorb on interfaces and lower the surface or interfacial tension. Since the degree of ionization of the edge -COOH groups is affected by pH, GO's amphiphilicity can be tuned by pH. In addition, size-dependent amphiphilicity of GO sheets is observed. Since each GO sheet is a single molecule as well as a colloidal particle, the molecule-colloid duality makes it behave like both a molecular and a colloidal surfactant. For example, GO is capable of creating highly stable Pickering emulsions of organic solvents like solid particles. It can also act as a molecular dispersing agent to process insoluble materials such as graphite and carbon nanotubes in water. The ease of its conversion to chemically modified graphene could enable new opportunities in solution processing of functional materials.