
ISSN Online: 2379-1748
ISBN Flash Drive: 978-1-56700-518-9
5th Thermal and Fluids Engineering Conference (TFEC)
Determining micro droplet profile using internal reflection interference
Аннотация
We introduce an optical diagnostics to determine the dual-surface profile of liquid droplet using internal reflection
interferometry. A coherent laser beam is internally reflected on the air/liquid interface of a sessile droplet placed on a
prism-based substrate to produce an interference fringe on a screen far from the substrate. The reflected laser rays
consist of the reflection from the center spherical droplet profile and the one from the lower hyperbola-like droplet
profile. The reflected rays are interfered each other to form the interference fringes. Ray tracing simulation is
conducted using a custom-designed computer program. The simulation shows that the interfering rays reflected near
the inflection point produce the outer-most fringes of the concentric interference pattern on the screen, and the reflected rays from the apex of the spherical profile and the contact line of the lower hyperbola-like profile construct the fringes at the center of the interference patterns. The simulated results are compared with the experimental observation to show a good agreement in the number and the location of the fringes and the radius of the outer-most-fringe where the number of the fringes is dependent on the droplet thickness and the radius of the fringe depends on the contact angle of the droplet. This result provides a new measurement technique to determine the morphological features of very
small microdroplet such as the thickness (< a few micron thickness), the contact angle (< a few degree), and the dualsurface profile.