On the temporal analysis of acoustic waves using schlieren imaging

The primary objective of the present study was to develop a quantitative schlieren-imaging technique that can be used to study the dynamics of instability waves. The technique was initially validated by optically capturing a controlled acoustic wave generated by a compression driver and excellent agreement was obtained with microphone measurements. An underexpanded jet was considered as an ideal test case due to the complexity and multitude of instability mechanism. Further analysis of the underexpanded jet demonstrated that this technique can be used to capture the very high frequency mode related to the phenomenon of screech.