Liquid Wicking in a Paper Strip: An Experimental and Numerical Study

In this decade, paper-based microfluidics has gained more interest in the research due to the vast applications in medical diagnosis, environmental monitoring, food safety analysis, etc. In this work, we presented a set of experiments to understand the physics of the capillary flow phenomenon through paper strips. Here, using the wicking phenomenon of the liquid in porous media, experimentally, we find out the capillary height of the liquid in filter paper at different time intervals. It was found that the Lucas-Washburn (L-W) model, as well as the evaporation model, fails to predict the capillary rise accurately. However, the detailed numerical solution shows a better similarity with the experimental results. We have also shown the different regimes of the wicking phenomenon using scaling analysis of the modified L-W model. The capillary rise method was applied to detect the added water content in milk. We used milk as a liquid food and found the added water content from the change in the capillary height at different concentrations of milk. Finally, results obtained from the paper-based device were verified with the commercially available lactometer data.