Evaluation of temperature and concentration fields from refractive index field for evaporation-induced convective flow

Abstract

Abstract The present work relates to the simultaneous determination of concentration and temperature fields from a refractive index field, and is motivated by applications in evaporation. Several optical measurement techniques such as schlieren and interferometry can measure the refractive index field, which can then be converted to a density and temperature field for a single component system. The refractive index, however, is dependent on both temperature and concentration for a multi-component system involving combined heat and mass transfer. Hence, either the temperature or concentration field must be known to obtain the other. To circumvent this issue, several methods are evaluated in this study to extract concentration and temperature fields from a refractive index field. The evaluation is performed based on data from a coupled numerical solution of Navier–Stokes, energy and species conservation equations. The refractive index field can be obtained from this computed temperature and concentration field. This refractive index field is then separately used to obtain the combined temperature-concentration field using the method proposed in this work. This method is based on the premise that there is a relationship between temperature and concentration fields which can help to independently calculate both when the refractive index field is known. The temperature and concentration fields obtained using this approach are then compared with the originally computed field and the errors in them are estimated for a wide range of Lewis numbers. From the study, it is concluded that the proposed methods can be used to accurately determine the temperature and concentration fields from a given refractive index field.