The influence of nano-particle tracers on the slip length measurements by microPTV

Abstract

Direct measurement of slip length is based on the measured fluid velocity near solid boundary. However, previous micro particle image velocimetry/particle tracking velocimetry (microPIV/PTV) measurements have reported surprisingly large measured near-wall velocities of pressuredriven flow in apparent contradiction with the no-slip hypothesis and experimental results from other techniques. To better interpret the measured results of the microPIV/PTV, we performed velocity profile measurements near a hydrophilic wall (z = 0.25–1.5 μm) with two sizes of tracer particles (ϕ 50 nm and ϕ200 nm). The experimental results indicate that, at less than 1 μm from the wall, the deviations between the measured velocities and no-slip theoretical values obviously decrease from 93% of ϕ200 nm particles to 48% of ϕ50 nm particles. The Boltzmann-like exponential measured particle concentrations near wall were found. Based on the non linear Boltzmann distribution of particle concentration and the effective focus plane thickness, we illustrated the reason of the apparent velocity increase near wall and proposed a method to correct the measured velocity profile. By this method, the deviations between the corrected measured velocities and the no-slip theoretical velocity decrease from 45.8% to 10%, and the measured slip length on hydrophilic glass is revised from 75 nm to 16 nm. These results indicated that the particle size and the biased particle concentration distribution can significantly affect near wall velocity measurement via microPIV/PTV, and result in larger measured velocity and slip length close to wall.