Developing experimental techniques for quantitative analysis of high speed flows in short duration shock tunnels is always a challenge. There exist several successful experimental techniques well established for quantitative analysis of the flows of different speeds.Among them Interferometry, BOS, Shadow-casting and quantitative schlieren are the main.In the above mentioned techniques a dedicated environment is essential to conduct the investigation. The dedicated environment dictates the need of complicated optical arrangements for Interferometry, need of random pattern in BOS and Shadow-casting or color filter/ knife edge in case of quantitative schlieren.
In this manuscript a dedicated handheld camera is proposed for quantitative analysis of flow field. This camera can be used as conventional camera for capturing images of flow in digital form which later can be processed to extract quantitative information about the flow. The basic working principle of the device lies in the wavefront reconstruction from delayed light travel time data.The traversed wavefront through the test section of interest changes and is different from the wavefront when there is no flow. The change in phase can be detected by our camera. This wavefront sensing camera allows users to quantitatively measure the amplitude and phase front variation of the captured light wave. This phase information can be inferred to density and is very much useful for high speed flow studies.
The details of the developed camera along with its applications in quantitative flow visualization will be reported in the full manuscript.
