Optical diagnostics for high-speed flows

Since 2000 there has been a revolution in diagnostics of high-speed air flows. The foundations for this revolution were laid over the past few decades, but with the development of new short pulse and pulse burst laser technologies, higher laser powers and higher pulse energies, new high-speed cameras, better laser control and improved detection and laser delivery methodologies, many very effective new capabilities have been developed. Newly developed methods for molecular tagging velocimetry provide high fidelity visualization of transport properties and may be extended to simultaneous temperature measurements. Rapid field imaging with frequency tunable pulse burst lasers shows instantaneous flow structure and complex boundary and mixing interactions. Extending these pulse burst concepts to swept volumetric imaging is very promising for full volumetric data collection. Fast wavelength modulation spectroscopy follows real-time flow variation, and three-dimensional particle imaging extends particle imaging velocimetry to volumetric data acquisition.