Shedding new light on gas dynamics

Abstract

Modern laser-spectroscopic techniques usually incorporate one or more laser beams and depend on their radiative interaction with some spectroscopic feature of the gas. Attention is given to laser absorption, laser-induced fluorescence, Rayleigh scattering, and Raman scattering. Consideration is given to UV Rayleigh scattering applied to aerodynamic flows to obtain images of a supersonic boundary layer that show instantaneous turbulent structures at a level of detail not achieved by any other practical method.