Quantitative visualization of flow inside an evaporating droplet using the ray tracing method

Liquid droplets possess many practically important applications and academically interesting issues. Accurate flow data are necessary to correlate the hydrodynamic characteristics with the physicochemical processes occurring inside a droplet. However, the refraction of light at the droplet surface makes it difficult to measure the flow field inside the droplet accurately. To resolve this problem, two correction methods based on the ray tracing technique are employed. One is the image mapping method and the other is the velocity mapping method. For this, a mapping function between the image plane and the object plane is derived. The two correction methods are applied to the flow inside evaporating droplets of different ethanol concentrations for measuring their velocity fields, using a PIV method. The results obtained with the two methods are nearly identical. The major differences between the original results and the corrected results are found in the locations of the vortex centres and the magnitude of velocity vectors. Between the two correction methods, the velocity mapping method is recommended, because it is more convenient and recovers a greater number of velocity vectors, compared with the image restoration method.