A Study on the Development of Measurement Techniques for Thermal Flows in MEMS

A Study on the Development of Measurement Techniques for Thermal Flows in MEMS

A review on advanced flow visualization techniques is presented particularly for applications to micro scale heat and mass transport measurements. Challenges, development and applications of micro scale visualization techniques are discussed for the study of heating/evaporating thin films, a heated micro channel, and a thermopneumatic micro pump. The developed methods are (1) Molecular Tagging Fluorescence Velocimetry (MTFV) using 10-nm caged seeding molecules (2) Micro Particle Velocimetry (MPIV) and (3) Ratiometric Laser Induced Fluorescence (LIF) for micro-resolution thermometry. These three methods are totally non-intrusive techniques and would be useful to investigate the temperature and flow characteristics in MEMS. Each of these techniques is discussed in three-fold: (1) its operating principle and operation, (2) its application and measurement results, and (3) its future challenges.