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Measurement of Oxygen Diffusivity and Permeability in Polymers Using Fluorescence Microscopy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2010

Sanchari Chowdhury ,
Venkat R. Bhethanabotla  and
Rajan Sen
Sanchari Chowdhury
Affiliation:
Department of Chemical & Biomedical Engineering, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL 33620-5350, USA
Venkat R. Bhethanabotla*
Affiliation:
Department of Chemical & Biomedical Engineering, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL 33620-5350, USA
Rajan Sen
Affiliation:
Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL 33620-5350, USA
*
Corresponding author. E-mail: venkat@eng.usf.edu
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Abstract

A simple fluorescence microscopy technique is developed and presented to investigate heterogeneities in emission intensity and quenching responses of luminescence sensors and to measure diffusion and permeation coefficients of oxygen in polymers. Most luminescence oxygen sensors do not follow linearity of the Stern-Volmer (SV) equation due to heterogeneity of luminophore in the polymer matrix. To circumvent this limitation, inverted fluorescence microscopy is utilized in this work to investigate the SV response of the sensors at the micron scale. It was found that intensity is higher in regions where the luminophore is aggregated, but the response is poorer to oxygen concentration. In contrast, the nearly homogeneous regions exhibit linearity with high SV constants. In these diffusion experiments, oxygen concentration was measured by luminescence changes in regions with high SV constants and good linearity. Two diffusion experiments were performed—termed film-on-sensor and accumulation-in-volume techniques. A new Fick's law based quasi-steady-state diffusion model was developed and combined with the SV equation to obtain effective permeation coefficients for the accumulation-in-volume technique. Using these experimental techniques, oxygen diffusion properties in free-standing Teflon polymer films, cast silicon elastomers, and cast polydimethylsiloxane films containing different weight percentages of zeolite were determined with good precision.

Keywords

Stern-Volmer equationnonlinearitymicroscopic heterogeneityoxygen sensordiffusion model
Type
Fluorescence and Confocal Microscopies
Information
Microscopy and Microanalysis , Volume 16 , Issue 6 , December 2010 , pp. 725 - 734
Copyright
Copyright © Microscopy Society of America 2010

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References

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