Immiscible Blends in Confined Flow

The past decades have witnessed a rapid development of micro- and nanotechnology that is being used in a wide 

The research on confined multiphase liquid-liquid systems can roughly be divided into two main categories namely multiphase microfluidics and morphology development in confined shear flow. In the present work, a brief description of the main achievements of the second type of studies will be provided. It should be noted that morphology development in confined flow is an active research area at present and the effects of confinement on the dynamics of multiphase systems are far from fully understood. Detailed descriptions of the present state of the art can be found in several reviews [61,134-136]. 

The deformation and orientation of sheared droplets in confinement have been studied by experimental, analytical and numerical methods [134]. Consensus exists that geometrical confinement increases the droplet deformation and its orientation with respect to the flow direction, mainly for systems with a large viscosity ratio [137]. Shapira and Haber determined an analytical solution for the droplet deformation in confined flow, up to the first order in Ca, which corresponds to the Taylor deformation parameter multiplied by an additional factor to take into account confinement [138]  

In addition to the extensive amount of work on the dynamics of confined Newtonian droplets in a Newtonian matrix [134], also the combined effects of geometrical confinement and either compatibilization by means of block copolymers or viscoelasticity of one of the blend phases has received 

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