Laser Probing of a Weakly Ionized Turbulent Gas: Comparison of Neutral and Plasma Fluctuations

Abstract

The structure of a turbulent gas flow may be probed by analyzing scintillations of a laser beam which has traversed the turbulent medium. This technique is used to measure the spectrum of neutral gas turbulence in a pipe flow where the gas is nonuniformly heated and weakly ionized by an electrical discharge. First, the usual isotropic analysis relating the spectrum of light scintillations to the fluid turbulence is extended to include strong anisotropy as is appropriate in the present case. Second, the gas turbulence spectrum revealed by the scintillation, as well as by a hot film anemometer, is compared with the spectrum of plasma density fluctuations. It is found that the scale size of the neutral gas turbulence is larger than the scale size of the plasma density fluctuations by a factor of 2 for a case in which the plasma column is constricted to a considerably smaller diameter than the pipe. This indicates that whenever the plasma production process is constricted to dimensions smaller than the gas turbulence scale size, then the spectrum of wind-driven plasma fluctuations will not be representative of the background gas turbulence.