An experimental and numerical study of microfluidic preparation of chitosan nanoparticle

Abstract

Nanoparticle characteristics play a significant role in determining to proper nanocarrier for drug delivery. The improvement of cell response can obtain by simply manipulating the size of the implemented nanocarrier. This study aims to optimize nanoparticle characteristics (size and the polydispersity of chitosan, a common polymer, for further investigation. We used both numerical and experimental studies for this purpose. The coaxial microfluidic device was fabricated for the semi-automatic synthesis of nanoparticles. A real three-dimensional model of the chip was modeled in COMSOL Multiphysics (version 6.0) to evaluate the optimum mixing condition. In the result, the nanoparticle synthesized via microfluidic had a hydrodynamic size of 314 nm with narrow dispersity presented by low polydispersity. Consequently, the correlation between the nanoparticle's size, flow ratio, and mixing condition was discussed briefly.