New experimental method to measure pure and cross diffusion coefficients of transparent ternary mixtures using Mach–Zehnder interferometry

• Pure and cross diffusion coefficients measurement using two lasers in MZI setup.
• Combination of Fourier transformations used for phase extraction.
• Evolutionary algorithm is used for estimation of free parameters.
• The proposed technique is examined against SODI-DCMIX project on board the ISS.
• Diffusion measurement which does not need for any contact with medium.

In this study, a Mach–Zehnder interferometer that is equipped with two lasers of different wavelengths was used to conduct high resolution measurements of concentration profiles of a ternary mixture inside a diffusion cell. Windowed Fourier transform along with an advanced unwrapping procedure was employed to extract the phase image from fringe images. Then the phase difference was obtained for a spatial resolution of 1920×1240. According to the measured refractive index profile, concentration contours of two components (out of three) were measured. Consequently, the concentration profile of the third components was calculated. Previously, the analytical solution for binary mixtures was used to estimate only the pure diffusion coefficients. In this study, for the first time, the refractive indices measured by two lasers along with the analytical solution for the ternary system, based on Fick׳s law, and an evolutionary algorithm (EA) known as a genetic algorithm (GA) were employed to measure the pure and cross diffusion coefficients of a transparent ternary mixture simultaneously. The optimization method to estimate diffusion coefficients was tested against various objective functions, and the best approach was that which was proposed herein. In order to validate the proposed measurement method, the experimental results of the Selectable Optical Diagnostics Instrument-Diffusion Coefficients in Mixtures (SODI-DCMIX1 project) on board the International Space Station (ISS) were analyzed using this technique and the obtained results were compared with previous techniques.