2D fringe probing of liquid film dynamics of a plug bubble in a micropipe

An extended film thickness measurement method that can obtain the liquid film thickness profile of the whole plug bubble in a capillary tube simultaneously is presented. The approach is based on a 2D spatial fringe scattering technique, where the spatial frequency of scattered fringes is a function of liquid film thickness along the micropipe. Laser sheets are used instead of the laser beams, and the width of the laser sheets can be selected to cover the whole measurement field. Capillary tubes, with inner diameters of 1.0 mm and 0.3 mm, and lengths of 125 mm and 65 mm, are used. A gas plug bubble, 2.5–20 mm long, is introduced and moves through the testing part of the tube, which is filled with water as the working fluid. The interference fringes produced by two incident laser sheets are scattered from the interface between gas and water, and captured by a high-speed camera at a speed of up to 2000 frames s−1. The experimental results show that the improved method can obtain the liquid film thickness profile at the different times and can be used to analyze the status of the plug bubble movement in a micropipe