Millifluidic as a versatile reactor to tune size and aspect ratio of large polymerized objects W. Engl a , M. Tachibana a,1 , P. Panizza a, * ,1 , R. Backov b, * a Laboratoire du Futur, Rhodia/CNRS, FRE 2177, 178 Avenue A. Schweitzer, 33608 Pessac Cedex, France b Centre de Recherche Paul Pascal, UPR CNRS 8641, 115 Avenue A. Schweitzer, 33600 Pessac Cedex, France Received 17 October 2006; received in revised form 28 March 2007 Abstract The continuous production ‘‘on demand’’ of large polymerized objects is presented using a versatile, easy to implement and low cost ‘‘millifluidic’’ reactor. Over microfluidic devices, the present set-up offers two considerable advantages: (i) much larger particles are produced with a very good control of sizes and shapes and (ii) no lithography is required for its design. Considering the high modularity of this synthetic pathway, ‘‘tubular millifluidic’’ appears as a new concept of synthesizing particles with a strong control over final object sizes, monodispersity and aspect ratio. The possibility to reach a high scale production makes it a promising production tools for the industry. Ó 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Millifluidic; Microfluidic; Coaxial flow; Polymer; Shaping process 1. Introduction There is today a strong and emerging interest toward designing novel and complex architectures which can respond to society’s particular needs in advanced technology or in the medical field. In this general context, as recently postulated by Backov (2006), chemistry, physical-chemistry, physics and biology can be assembled within a new concept of ‘‘integrative chemistry’’ that appears as a versatile tool-box dedicated to design and create novel hierarchical architectures. Along this line, hierarchically organized structures patterns can be used at different length scales. For instance, Imhof and Pine (1997), Binks (2002) and Carn et al. (2004) make the use of lyotropic mesophases at the mesoscale while employing bi-liquid foams as macroscopic tem- plates. Similarly, air-liquid foams macroscopic templates can be used to shape either silica as demonstrated by Carn et al. (2004), titanium dioxyde proposed by Carn et al. (2005) or vanadium oxide shown more recently by Carn et al. (2005). As shown by Biette et al. (2005) and Serier et al. (2006), previous thermodynamically meta- stable systems can also be substituted by the appliance of external fields, as it is the case for the extrusion 0301-9322/$ - see front matter Ó 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.ijmultiphaseflow.2007.03.007 * Corresponding authors. Tel.: +33 (0)2 23 23 57 00 (P. Panizza); Tel.: +33 (0)5 56 84 56 30 (R. Backov). E-mail addresses: pascal.panizza@univ-rennes1.fr (P. Panizza), Backov@crpp-bordeaux.cnrs.fr (R. Backov). 1 Present address: GMCM-UMR CNRS 6626, Campus Beaulieu, Universite ´ Rennes 1, 35042, France. International Journal of Multiphase Flow 33 (2007) 897–903 www.elsevier.com/locate/ijmulflow