On-Line Processing of Pressure-Sensitive Paint Images

Abstract

This paper documents a milestone that has been reached at the Arnold Engineering Development Center, namely to reduce data reduction time for pressure-sensitive paint (PSP) images sufficiently that one data point can be processed in full while the next data point is being collected. Specifically, it is shown that for both intensity-based and lifetime-based PSP, data reduction from all eight cameras in the wind tunnel can be accomplished in 5 to 10 seconds. This milestone was achieved through improvements in hardware, software, and the implementation of parallel processing, all of which are described in this paper. Different processing schemes are discussed, and timing results are presented for benchmark data sets from wind tunnel tests on scale models of an F-16C and NASA’s X-38.