Schlieren-Based Methodology for Tomographic Reconstruction of 3D Density Field in RDE Exhaust

Rainbow Schlieren Deflectometry (RSD) can provide quantitative measurements of ray deflection angles in a rotating detonation engine (RDE) that can be used to validate synthetic RSD (s-RSD) images created from numerical simulations or to directly invert RSD data from experiments using 3D tomography for constructing the local scalar fields. The overall goal of this paper is to develop and verify ray tracing methodology to create s-RSD data from RDE simulations and then to apply a tomography algorithm to reconstruct the local density field. Overall, this study provides quantitative validation and characterization of various algorithms to develop a comprehensive understanding of RDE performance.