The Diffusion of Passive Tracers in Laminar Shear Flow

A simple method to experimentally observe and measure the dispersion of a passive tracer in a laminar fluid flow is described. The method consists of first injecting fluorescent dye directly into a pipe filled with distilled water and allowing it to diffuse across the cross-section of the pipe to obtain a uniformly distributed initial condition. Following this period, the laminar flow is activated with a programmable syringe pump to observe the competition of advection and diffusion of the tracer through the pipe. Asymmetries in the tracer distribution are studied and correlations between the pipe cross-section and the shape of the distribution is shown: thin channels (aspect ratio << 1) produce tracers arriving with sharp fronts and tapering tails (front-loaded distributions), while thick channels (aspect ratio similar to 1) present the opposite behavior (back-loaded distributions). The experimental procedure is applied to capillary tubes of various geometries and is particularly relevant to microfluidic applications by dynamical similarity.