Determining Micro Droplet Profile Using Internal Reflection Interference Fringes

Abstract

Abstract We introduce an optical diagnostics to determine the morphological features of liquid droplet such as the thickness, the contact angle, and the dual profile 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 dual-surface profile.