Controlled production of emulsions and particles by milli- and microfluidic techniques

The recent developments of soft lithography and microfluidic techniques now permit the manipulation of small quantities of fluids with very good control and reproducibility. These advances open a new "bottom-up" route to emulsification that paves the way to the fabrication of calibrated hierarchically organized emulsions and particles. In this article, we describe the microfluidic techniques elaborated for engineering emulsions and new dispersed materials and discuss their advantages over "top-down" approaches. We review and comment the high potentialities these techniques offer to emulsion and colloid science, to the development of high-throughput set-ups for chemistry, physics and biology. We illustrate them through a few examples taken from the current literature. (C) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.