Experimental investigation on aero-optical aberration of the supersonic flow passing through an optical dome with gas injection

Abstract

During the flight in the atmosphere, the optical window of an optical dome needs to be cooled, and supersonic film cooling is one of the economic ways. After traversing through the complex flow field above the window, the optical wave would be distorted by fluctuations in the density field due to the expansion wave, shockwave, mixing layer, turbulent boundary layer, etc. The aero-optical aberrations induced by the flow field of an optical dome in the presence and in the absence of the gas injection at Mach 3.8 are investigated experimentally. Based on the nano-tracer planar laser scattering (NPLS) technique, the density field with high spatial-temporal resolution is first obtained by the flow image calibration, and then the optical path difference (OPD)fluctuations of the original 532 nm planar wavefront perpendicular to the window are calculated using Ray-tracing theory. Also the OPD fluctuations caused by the near-wall region flow structures are presented. In the absence of the gas injection, the flow structure is relatively simple with a long recirculation and laminar region, while in the presence of the gas injection, there appear more complex structures such as shear layer, mixing layer and turbulent boundary layer and the flow is converted into turbulence quickly. Clearly, the optical aberration in the presence of the gas injection is degraded more. For example, the values of root-mean-square OPD (OPDrms) in the absence of the gas injection are 0.038 μm and 0.0356 μm, and they are 0.0462 μm, and 0.0485 μm in the presence of the gas injection during the interval 5 μs.