Application of Background Oriented Schlieren for quantitative measurement of transonic flows

Abstract

Flow visualization techniques have progressed from methods based on qualitative description of flow-field into techniques providing both qualitative and quantitative results. In this paper we present implementation of Background Oriented Schlieren (BOS) technique for measurements of density values at transonic speeds. The density values obtained by BOS were then compared with results from CFD analysis of the same flow characteristics. In both qualitative and quantitative terms, the BOS and CFD results agreed, which proves the applicability of BOS for transonic flows.