Simultaneous imaging of temperature and concentration of ethanol–water mixtures in microchannel using near-infrared dual-wavelength absorption technique

Abstract

This paper presents a simultaneous imaging method of temperature and ethanol concentration of ethanol–water mixtures in microfluidic channels. The principle is based on the facts that the absorbance at a wavelength of 1905 nm is dependent on the temperature of water and that the absorbance at 1935 nm is independent of the temperature but strongly dependent on the molar concentration of water, which is reciprocal to the molar concentration of ethanol in the mixture. The absorbance images at the two wavelengths were acquired alternately, each at 50 frames per second, by an alternate irradiation system and near-infrared (NIR) camera, and then converted to the temperature and concentration images by a linear regression model. The imaging method was applied to a dilute ethanol–water mixture with an ethanol concentration of 0.43 M and water flowing side by side in a temperature-controlled Y-channel. The concentration images clearly showed differences between the mixture and water streams, and that the transverse concentration gradient between the two streams decreased downstream by mutual diffusion. It was also confirmed that the mutual diffusion coefficient increased as the temperature increased. The temperature images showed that uniform distributions were immediately formed due to heat transfer between the fluid and channel materials.