Résumé
The dynamics of liquid-liquid mixing is a difficult problem, encountered in many scientific and engineering branches. Experiments in this field are mandatory to help building sound mathematical models, finding out the best fit parameters, evaluating the degree of confidence of these models, or detecting traces of unwanted dangerous substances. The investigations reported here are driven by water pollution concerns. For analyzing the water-pollutant blending behavior, dynamic speckle interferometry has been preferred to more standard optical full field methods, like deflectometry, or classical and holographic interferometry. The choice of this technique is vindicated. The opto-fluidic system is described. A first series of results is presented, demonstrating the effectiveness of the technique and showing qualitatively how two liquids blend in controlled conditions. In the last part of the paper, recently appeared processing schemes, including empirical mode decomposition, Hilbert transform and piecewise treatment, give access to the numerical values of the phase maps computed for each frame of the recorded sequence. These phase maps represent the refractive index distributions integrated along the line of sight. They provide a better visualization of the dynamics of the blending behavior and therefore an improved understanding of the phenomena. These encouraging preliminary results should open the door to a full characterization of the method and to further flow investigations and diagnostics.