5. Application examples

5.1 Measurement of nucleation kinetics

Most crystallization solutions studied, and brought to supersaturation to trigger nucleation, contain a quantity of impurities, which can potentially act as active sites promoting heterogeneous nucleation. Nevertheless, nucleation can also occur homogeneously within the solution. By using microfluidic systems implementing the division of the initial solution into smaller volumes (drops), these impurities are compartmentalized and consequently, the nucleation rate is lower and can be measured experimentally. Figure 8 shows a droplet microfluidic device for stopping the progression of droplets in channels...