SPATIALLY SELECTED SPECKLE-CORRELOMETRY OF TEMPERATURE DEPENDENT GELATION KINETICS

Abstract

The paper presents the application of speckle correlometry method with the spatial ring filtration of back scattered field with the usage of localized radiation source for the study of dynamic thermally activated processes in gel-like structures containing submicron particles and nanoparticles. Speckle-modulated images contain information about the processes taking place inside the investigated medium; therefore, they are effectively used in biomedicine and materials science. The transformation process from lysol to gel was considered in media based on technical gelatin dissolved in water with weight fraction equal to 0.28% containing titanium dioxide nanoparticles TiO2 (volume fraction of particles is equal to 0.1% and 0.01%) and media based on food gelatin dissolved in water with weight fraction equal to 0.3% containing titanium dioxide nanoparticles TiO2 (volume fraction of particles is equal to 0.01% and 0.01%). The temperature of the medium during the structural transformation of "sol-gel" system was changed from 50 to 25°C. To estimate the experimentally obtained distribution of space-time intensity fluctuations of backscattered speckle fields, the correlation analysis and the formalism of Kolmogorov structure functions were used. The estimations of activation temperatures for the “sol-gel” transition process for technical and food gelatin were obtained. This approach can be successfully applied for the study of dynamic systems, for example, the demonstration of Brownian particle movements.

Keywords

• scattering
• speckles
• correlation function
• structural function
• hydrogels