Real-time simulation of aero-optical distortions due to air density fluctuations at supersonic speed

Abstract

Implementations of visual simulations of shock phenomenon have been given significantly less-attention in last decades. We present a novel approach to simulate aero-optical distortions due to shock waves generated by a supersonic jet by considering the physics background of the shock phenomenon.The optical distortion is simulated by calculating the index of refraction for oblique shock waves. The refractive index for the shock wave was calculated, by considering the mean characteristics of supersonic flows. Even though the flow characteristics are not uniform across the shock wave the results shows that this approach is a better way to simulate aero-optical distortions in real time.