Highly sensitive measurement of liquid density in air using suspended microcapillary resonators

© 2015 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. We report the use of commercially available glass microcapillaries as micromechanical resonators for real-time monitoring of the mass density of a liquid that flows through the capillary. The vibration of a suspended region of the microcapill...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Malvar, Óscar, Ramos Vega, Daniel, Domínguez, Carmen M., Kosaka, Priscila M., Tamayo de Miguel, Francisco Javier, Calleja, Montserrat
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2015
País:España
Institución:Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC)
Repositorio:DIGITAL.CSIC. Repositorio Institucional del CSIC
OAI Identifier:oai:digital.csic.es:10261/123430
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/10261/123430
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Micromechanical sensors
Rheology
Suspended microchannel resonators
Microcapillaries
Descripción
Sumario:© 2015 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. We report the use of commercially available glass microcapillaries as micromechanical resonators for real-time monitoring of the mass density of a liquid that flows through the capillary. The vibration of a suspended region of the microcapillary is optically detected by measuring the forward scattering of a laser beam. The resonance frequency of the liquid filled microcapillary is measured for liquid binary mixtures of ethanol in water, glycerol in water and Triton in ethanol. The method achieves a detection limit in an air environment of 50 μg/mL that is only five times higher than that obtained with state-of-the-art suspended microchannel resonators encapsulated in vacuum. The method opens the door to novel advances for miniaturized total analysis systems based on microcapillaries with the add-on of mechanical transduction for sensing the rheological properties of the analyzed fluids without the need for vacuum encapsulation of the resonators.