Employing optoelectronic laser speckle imaging to reveal molecular dynamics followed by the thermal expansion of liquid water

We presented a low-cost electronic speckle imaging method for quantifying and monitoring the moderate expansion and contraction of fluids. The system comprises the steps of recording a stack of electronic speckle patterns of the liquid under coherent light illumination, generating velocity vector fields of the temporal dynamic speckle sequence, calculating profile velocity at different temperatures of the liquid, evaluating the inertia moment (IM) of the temporal history of speckle patterns followed by the computation of the co-occurrence matrices. The results show that profile velocity at different temperatures may be used to determine the liquid’s thermal state. The test evaluated speckle grain size as a potential criterion for monitoring the liquid’s moderate thermal expansion and allowed for the measurement of thermal exchange between the system and its surroundings even at very low temperatures (4 °C). The experiment demonstrates the effectiveness of the laser speckle imaging technique at the macro- and micro-scale molecular dynamics levels.