• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• v.35 no.4
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• pp.257-261
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• 2010

Surface energy is the principal factor of anti-condensation. High surface energy appears hydrophilic itself and low surface energy represents hydrophobic itself. The contact angle is widely being used for measurement of surface energy of materials, evaluation of coating performances, measurement of wettability, and so on. However, the existing contact angle measuring system is so expensive for purchasing and complicated, so it takes a lot of time and money to use. This study was conducted to develop the algorithm for evaluating hydrophilic performance through measuring the contact angle of water droplet automatically, and fabricate relatively simple measuring system using a low-cost monochrome camera and image processing. A constant amount of water was firstly allocated on a slide by a micropipette, and then the image of water droplet was captured by monochrome digital camera and sent to a computer. The image was binarized and then reduced noises by labeling. Finally, the contact angle of water droplet was computed by using three points (left, right, and top coordinates), simple linear mathematics, and trigonometric function. The experimental results demonstrated the accuracy and reproducibility of the developed system showing less deviations and deviation ratio.