purpose. These active methods involve moving parts and/or require explicit external actuation.

A very useful alternative to this approach is the generation of continuous droplet streams. This process essentially relies on the interface deformation and pinching caused by the ow eld [42]. The uid motion eventually triggers interfacial instabilities which yield the breakage of the interface into a collection of droplets. This passive methodology is very attractive because leads to large production rates and a high degree of monodispersity. Continuous droplet streams are driven by surface tension and a combination of external, thermal, chemical, and hydrodynamic forces. Dierent techniques have been proposed to generate such forces. Among the external elds, one can distinguish the gravitational and electric forces. The production of droplets under the action of gravity is probably the simplest method, but is limited to relatively large sizes and low production rates [54, 56]. Electrospray [57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62] constitutes a remarkable class of techniques which relies on the application of an electric eld. It can produce uid shapes of dierent types with sizes falling down to the nanometer scale [61]. Both microdroplets [63, 38] and microemulsions [64] have also been produced by the combined action of dc and ac electric elds and a coowing stream. Thermal eects induced by the energy of concentrated irradiation [65] and physicochemical processes produced by surfactants [66, 67] are just two other examples of energy sources used to producing droplets in a continuous manner. 2.3. Continuous production of droplets by hydrodynamic means Dierent purely hydrodynamic (mechanical) methods have been used to form and break a uid interface into drops. They can be grouped into three main classes: cross-owing systems, co-owing streams, and extensional coows. In cross-owing systems, two liquid streams intersect with each other, which generates stresses on the interface large enough to produce its pinching [68, 69, 42]. The production of droplets in co-owing streams is essentially caused by the viscous stresses exerted on the interface by the outer stream [30, 31, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74]. Finally, extensional co-ows are referred to as those in which the driving forces are produced by making the co-owing stream cross an orice located in front of the inner liquid source. This originates pressure gradients [75] and/or dilatational viscous stresses [76, 77, 78, 79] which stretch the interface until a uid particle or ligament is obtained. One can mention two popular methods falling into this last class. The ow 12