High-precision measurement system based on laser interferometer for determining alcohol concentration of liquid solution

This study develops a high-precision, non-destructive measurement technique based on a laser interferometer for determining the alcohol concentration of a liquid solution from its refractive index. The optical metrology system is employed to measure the refractive indexes of samples with known alcohol concentrations ranging from 5% to 95%. By applying regressional analysis to the experimental results, an analytical expression is derived to describe the quadratic relationship between the refractive index and the alcohol concentration. An excellent agreement is observed between the experimentally determined values of the alcohol concentration and the analytically predicted results. For an assumed laser interferometer resolution of 1 nm, the measurement resolution of the proposed metrology system is found to be at least F = 0.0025%, which is significantly better than that of typical stereometry methods (approximately 1.0%) Furthermore, it is shown that the measurement resolution improves as the alcohol concentration reduces. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.