VISUALIZATION AND ANALYSIS OF ADSORPTION BEHAVIOR OF ALCOHOLS ON AQUEOUS ALCOHOL SOLUTION SURFACES UTILIZING BREWSTER-ANGLE VIDEOMACROGRAPHY AND DIGITAL IMAGE-PROCESSING

An experimental study has been made to establish an optical method to investigate the adsorption behavior of alcohols on their aqueous solut ions without adding any tracer or fluorescent material to the solution s. An expanded laser beam with controlled polarization is incident upo n each solution surface of interest at the Brewster angle of air/water interface. This optical setting permits us to detect the p-polarized light reflected from an adsorbed film as two-dimensional real-time vid eograms with high sensitivities. The technique has been applied to vis ualizing adsorbed films of various alcohol homologues.