Effect of Laser-Induced Heating on Raman Measurement within a Silicon Microfluidic Channel

Abstract

When Raman microscopy is adopted to detect the chemical and biological processes in the silicon microfluidic channel, the laser-induced heating effect will cause a temperature rise in the sample liquid. This undesired temperature rise will mislead the Raman measurement during the temperature-influencing processes. In this paper, computational fluid dynamics simulations were conducted to evaluate the maximum local temperature-rise (MLT). Through the orthogonal analysis, the sensitivity of potential influencing parameters to the MLT was determined. In addition, it was found from transient simulations that it is reasonable to assume the actual measurement to be steady-state. Simulation results were qualitatively validated by experimental data from the Raman measurement of diffusion, a temperature-dependent process. A correlation was proposed for the first time to estimate the MLT. Simple in form and convenient for calculation, this correlation can be efficiently applied to Raman measurement in a silicon microfluidic channel.

Keywords

• laser-induced heating
• Raman measurement
• microchannel
• computational fluid dynamics