Metre-per-second microfluidic flow velocimetry with dual beam optical coherence tomography

A novel dual beam Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) instrument has been developed for high velocity flow measurement, principally in microfluidics applications. The scanned dual beam approach creates a pair of image-frames separated by a small spatiotemporal offset. Metre-per-second flow measurement is achieved by rapid re-imaging by the second beam allowing for particle tracking between each image-frame of the pair. Flow at 1.06 m/s using a single optical access port has been measured, more than two orders of magnitude larger than previously reported OCT systems, at centimetre depth and with millimetre scale depth of field within a microfluidic chip, whilst simultaneously imaging the microfluidic channel structure.