Flow visualization and density measurement of compressible flows by a laser speckle method

Laser speckle method is a well known technique that is useful for both visualization and quantitative measurement. This technique was applied to the density measurement of Mach reflection of shock waves in the present experiment. The Object of the measurement is the density field of simple Mach reflection in relatively low shock Mach number. The non-uniform flow field is divided into three regions by incident, Mach and reflected shock waves. A shock tube was employed in the present experiment. Wedges of 20 degrees and 45 degrees were placed in the test section. YAG laser was employed as a light source. Speckle photograph was taken by a digital still camera. Simple subtraction between the reference and flow images shows a shock pattern and a degree of the correlation of speckle pattern in the flow field. Thus, we can obtain a visualized flow image showing a configuration of Mach reflection from speckle photograph. Speckle photographs which was obtained in the experiments were processed with cross-correlation method. A reconstructed density gradient vector map of Mach reflection was obtained. Comparing the experimental result with numerical one, the measured density gradient shows a good agreement with theoretical prediction.