Note: Simultaneous measurement of transverse speed and axial velocity from a single optical beam

Abstract

A method is introduced for simultaneously measuring transverse speed and axial velocity using a single optical beam and a standard photon Doppler velocimetry (PDV) sensing architecture. This result is of particular interest given the recent, widespread use of PDV and the fact that optical velocimetry has thus far been limited to measuring motion in one dimension per probe. Further, this result demonstrates that both axial velocity data and transverse speed data (at least qualitative) may be obtained entirely through signal analysis; not requiring hardware modification. This result is immediately relevant to analyses of existing PDV data and to future efforts in high-speed optical velocimetry.