Coherent Rayleigh-Brillouin Scattering as a Flow Diagnostic Technique

Broadband coherent Rayleigh-Brillouin scattering (CRBS) was used to measure translational gas temperatures for nitrogen at the ambient pressure of 0.8 atm using a purpose-built Fabry-Perot etalon spectrometer. Temperatures derived from the CRBS spectral analysis were compared with experimentally-measured temperatures, and were found to be, on average, within 2% of the experimentally-measured value. Axial flow, velocities from a double jet at a pressure ratio of 0.38 were also measured by looking at the Doppler shift of the CRBS line shape. With recent developments in chirped laser technology and the capacity of CRBS to simultaneously provide thermodynamic and bulk flow information, the CRBS line shape acquisition and analysis technique presented here may allow for future time-resolved, characterization of aerospace flows.