Pressure-Sensitive Molecular Film for Experimental Analyses of Micro Gas-Flows

Pressure-sensitive paint (PSP) is an optical measurement technique based on the photo-chemical reaction between oxygen and luminescent molecules, and has potential as a diagnostic tool for pressure measurement in the high Knudsen number regime. However, the application of PSP to micro flow measurement is not straightforward, because conventional PSPs are too thick owing to their polymer binder. In our previous work, we fabricated pressure-sensitive molecular film (PSMF) by using the Langmuir-Blodgett (LB) technique. In this study, we investigated the temperature dependency of Pt(II) Mesoporphyrin IX (PtMP) based PSMF, and found that the temperature dependency of the pressure sensitivity is very small. Moreover, we have applied PSMF to the pressure measurement of micro gas flows through the 170μm width micro channel and the 100μm width micro nozzle, and the pressure distributions were successfully obtained.