Quantitative full-colour transmitted light microscopy and dyes for concentration mapping and measurement of diffusion coefficients in microfluidic architectures.

A simple and versatile methodology has been developed for the simultaneous measurement of multiple concentration profiles of colourants in transparent microfluidic systems, using a conventional transmitted light microscope, a digital colour (RGB) camera and numerical image processing combined with multicomponent analysis. Rigorous application of the Beer-Lambert law would require monochromatic probe conditions, but in spite of the broad spectral bandwidths of the three colour channels of the camera, a linear relation between the measured optical density and dye concentration is established under certain conditions. An optimised collection of dye solutions for the quantitative optical microscopic characterisation of microfluidic devices is proposed. Using the methodology for optical concentration measurement we then implement and validate a simplified and robust method for the microfluidic measurement of diffusion coefficients using an H-filter architecture. It consists of measuring the ratio of the concentrations of the two output channels of the H-filter. It enables facile determination of the diffusion coefficient, even for non-fluorescent molecules and nanoparticles, and is compatible with non-optical detection of the analyte.