Large-scale droplet production in microfluidic devices—an industrial perspective

Microfluidic emulsification yields droplets with extremely narrow size distribution, multiple emulsions with a precisely controlled number of inner droplets, and higher order emulsions ranging from double to quintuple emulsions. However, production rates are inherently small and scale-up can be achieved by massive parallelization only. Can the control that microfluidic emulsification offers for drop production nevertheless be used for the production of materials? What will it take to develop it into an industrial process? Many obstacles need to be addressed ranging from technological, and commercial issues to a fragmented and confusing conference and supplier landscape. This contribution gives a large chemical industry's perspective on formulating materials in massively parallelized microfluidic processes.