Applicability of the aero-optic linking equation to a highly coherent, transitional shear layer

Abstract

We investigate the validity of applying a simplified (under the assumptions of isotropic and homogeneous turbulence) aero-optic linking equation to a flow field that is known to consist of anisotropic and nonhomogeneous turbulence. The investigation is performed in the near-nozzle region of a heated two-dimensional jet, and the study makes use of a conditional-sampling experiment to acquire a spatiotemporal temperature field database for the heated-jet flow field. After compensating for the bandwidth limitations of constant-current wire temperature measurements, the temperature field database is applied to the computation of optical degradation through both direct and indirect methods, relying on the aero-optic linking equation. The simplified version of the linking equation was found to provide good agreement with direct calculations, provided that the length scale of the density fluctuations was interpreted as being the integral scale, with the limits of integration being the first two zero crossings of the covariance coefficient function.