Dynamic sessile micro-droplet evaporation monitored by electric impedance sensing

Abstract

Studies of liquid evaporation on a solid surface are useful for wettability phenomena-related research, and can be applied in a series of scientific and industrial areas. However, traditional methods are not easy to be intergrated into small size to monitor evaporation process of a micro-droplet. In this paper, a micro-electrode array was used to measure the impedance of an electrolyte droplet, indicating the dynamic process of evaporation. This method uses the relationship between concentration and conductivity of the water solution to dynamically monitor the evaporation process. The dynamic impedance results were compared to weight and imaging data of droplet evaporation and demonstrate high correlation coefficient of the earlier 90% part of the sodium chloride droplet evaporation process (R² = 0.99). Our study proved that the height of the droplet will affect the impedance sensing result, and the solution used for droplet evaporation can be expanded to mixture of strong electrolyte solution such as phosphate buffered solution. Then the “impedance imaging” of the array monitored the evaporating speed differences of different sites of a sessile droplet. As the electrode array can be integrated into small size, this method is compatible for many other experimental systems and can be further used for evaporation studies and corresponding application areas.