Development and Application of Burst-Mode Planar Laser Diagnostics for Detonating and Hypersonic Flows

Burst-mode lasers and burst-mode optical parametric oscillators (OPOs) are applied and developed for planar laser induced fluorescence (PLIF) measurements of key species for high-speed combustion measurements. OH-PLIF in the rotating detonation engine was performed for the first time at wave structure visualization in two different planes and was 10 times faster than any other burst mode OH-PLIF measurements at the time. The same system was used to perform another OH-PLIF experiment at 1 MHz for ~200 pulses to compare key features of the detonation wave structure with computational fluid dynamic simulations and a fundamental detonation tube experiment. The system was also used for seedless velocity measurements in the exhaust by tracking a pocket of OH with a technique called FLASH. A similar OPO was built, aligned, and tuned to perform 1 MHz NO PLIF in a Mach 10 hypersonic tunnel to visualize second mode instabilities and calculate the frequency in the boundary layer transition of a 7-degree cone. A high-efficiency OPO was developed and characterized utilizing the KTP crystal to provide narrow bandwidth pulses for the fluorescence of multiple species. The OPO was pumped at repetition rates up to 1 MHz and was calculated to have a 1.9% UV efficiency from the fundamental 1064 nm output. This is 3 – 5 times increase in efficiency from previous custom and commercial built OPOs. The OPO was applied to the RDC for OH PLIF in the combustor channel and NO PLIF for injector dynamics and response studies. Lastly, a burst-mode laser was used to perform LII on the post detonation blast flow field to measure explosively generated soot. The data was taken at 1 MHz and compared and corrected with a separate set of experiments and computational simulations.