Optical Diagnostics of Flows

Flow dynamics research is involved in all branches of science and technology: civil and chemical engineering, the automotive industry, energy, etc. Flow dynamics are even more central to aeronautics technology because they provide air lift to planes (non-reacting flow dynamics) as well as the moving impetus through combustion (reacting flow dynamics). The great challenges of flow dynamics require the validation of physical models with relevant lengths ranges spanning a dozen of orders of magnitude, from a few Angstroms, at which atoms and molecules collide and bond (particularly in combustion), to a meter range (the size of a combustion chamber or a wing). Thanks to their non-invasive character, their spectrocopic and imaging possibilities, optical diagnostics are unsurpassed for addressing this enormous challenge.
Journal Aerospace Lab, Issue 1, December 2009; ISSN: 2107-6596